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@ Anthony Accioly
2025-03-21 03:10:01
I agree to an extent... especially regarding Mastodon's instance-level moderation and the trigger-happy / domain-wide banning being used as a go-to moderation tool. Turns out Mastodon some well known instances are dropping like flies. This is one of the reasons I’m against NIP-05 as a verification/moderation tool on Nostr.
The way ActivityPub is built also makes it harder to, say, run your own GoToSocial instance successfully and actually be seen in the network. That’s definitely a problem.
To be fair, Mostr has made me see a side of the Fediverse that I was blissfully unaware of. The worst crap from the Fediverse I’ve ever come across has come through the Mostr bridge.
To be honest, IMO, content-wise, Mastodon is still much better for my particular interests. I can't lie about this. I salute the heroes talking to themselves using hashtags around here, but in terms of content, Nostr is still mostly a work in progress for me.
When it comes to falling in line with normative standards, I tend to stay out of the craziness and do fine on both networks. That said, I have to admit I’ve had more issues with people trying to force their opinions on me on Mastodon. When I see respected scientists and journalists leaving Mastodon for Bluesky due to what they call friendly fire it really doesn’t look good for the network.
I like that muting people at an individual level is normalised here. Nostr culture doesn’t lead to as many people stalking and mobilising against you to "win".
Still, there’s plenty of toxicity on Nostr as well. The number of times I’ve seen people telling others "maybe they don’t belong on Nostr", along with formerly active nostriches who’ve told me they want nothing to do with Nostr anymore is concerning. I love Nostr, but I’m not sweeping this under the rug.
In a way, I see strength in the fact that different decentalised networks feel like home for different people right now. At the very least, no one can use worldview, religion, or political beliefs as an excuse not to try decentralised social media. Libertarians are cooking. Marxists are cooking too. Although one certainly get extra bragging rights for being a successful Libertarian on Mastodon or a successful Marxist on Nostr, rather than the other way around.
Hopefully, both networks will grow to the point where people can join, find their communities and talk about whatever they want without sticking out like a sore thumb. But you are right that this is not really happening anywhere as fast as I want. Ideally these communities won’t all defederate (to use Fediverse terminology) and fragment into a bunch of siloed echo chambers like you're saying (we certainly had examples of it like Truth Social). Crazy tribal behaviour is part of human nature. Segregated echo chambers? Those are really, really dangerous.