Decentralized Social Media Project Nostr's Damus Gets Listed On Apple App Store (coindesk.com) 24
Nostr, a startup decentralized social network, got its Twitter-like Damus application listed on Apple's App Store. CoinDesk reports: Nostr is an open protocol that aims to create a censorship-resistant global social network. Media commentators have described it as a possible alternative to Elon Musk's Twitter. According to an article in Protos, Nostr is popular with bitcoiners partly because most implementations of it support payments over Bitcoin's Lightning Network.
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who last year donated roughly 14 BTC (worth $245,000 at the time) to fund Nostr's development, hailed the debut of Damus on Apple's App Store as a "milestone for open protocols," in a tweet posted late Tuesday. As of press time, the tweet had been viewed 2.1 million times. According to the Nostr website, Damus is one of several Nostr projects, including Anigma, a Telegram-like chat; Nostros, a mobile client; and Jester, a chess application. You can download the iOS app here.
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who last year donated roughly 14 BTC (worth $245,000 at the time) to fund Nostr's development, hailed the debut of Damus on Apple's App Store as a "milestone for open protocols," in a tweet posted late Tuesday. As of press time, the tweet had been viewed 2.1 million times. According to the Nostr website, Damus is one of several Nostr projects, including Anigma, a Telegram-like chat; Nostros, a mobile client; and Jester, a chess application. You can download the iOS app here.
Congrats, I guess? (Score:2, Troll)
Good for them! I've never had an app on the App Store. Are they, like, the first ever to do that?
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yuck, yet another social media platform for cryptobros to destroy before it's viable.
No web client? (Score:2)
Smells odd.
Like, Element (matrix/synapse), but without something that works.
Meh, maybe it'll get better later.
Make this part of the Mastodon's fedi-verse? (Score:2)
Will this dilute the mass effect of Mastodon? Does Damus connect to federated space like Mastodon/Pixelfed etc.?
Alternatives are good (Score:2)
So what changed? (Score:2)
The lack of centralized ability to remove offending content was a block on acceptance a few months ago, did they add a centralized banlist for the iOS app only?
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Sounds suspect. There are a lot of encrypted chat apps out there. The only thing that changes here is that the servers facilitating connections are either non-existent or not centralized.
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Social media is a publishing platform, chat is not.
Telegram with chat history for instance straddles the line between the two, which is why it has had some trouble with appstore reviews. Signal is pure chat, which is why it hasn't.
Nostr (Score:1)
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You are either pessimistic and hate how everything is and how every decision is just making things worse, or you are a shill.
Interoperable with Mastodon? (Score:2)
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I'm getting a bit off-topic here. Upon partially reading the ActivityPub specifications, I see one huge usability flaw that will likely repel most users of social media. ActivityPub is based on connectionless polling, while centralized social media like Twitter is based on live, connected updates.
For Twitter, this means that someone's feed is automatically updated in real time as other users post updates. This makes efficient use of network resources, as users aren't constantly asking Twitter, "is there som
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Since it is open, you can write your own integrations. However, based on what I can read, that means each user will have to have their own integration. Your premise that it should integrate with any centralized service seems odd, the exact point is that it does not link up to Mastodon or Twitter censorship hubs.
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Your premise that it should integrate with any centralized service seems odd, the exact point is that it does not link up to Mastodon or Twitter censorship hubs.
Mastodon is not a centralized service. It’s a federated network, with each node able to make independent decisions about content moderation rules and what other nodes they choose to federate with. Doing so both allows parents to protect their children by creating a node that’s isolated from the Internet community-at-large while at the same time allowing those who want to see everything to see everything, with users self-selecting which experience they want.
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You're still connecting to massive central servers, whether that is Mastodon.social or TruthSocial, someone is capable of pulling censorship strings post-facto.
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You're still connecting to massive central servers...
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. With federated servers, there is no indication whether the server is large or small unless you start stress-testing it (like email servers).
...someone is capable of pulling censorship strings post-facto.
That is sometimes true, and sometimes not. Unlike with proprietary and/or centralized servers, you can create your own server that can pull down any set of content you want. Your upstream may censor certain content, but your server can download that content, perhaps from a different upstream source, and make it available/unavailable to othe
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You're still connecting to massive central servers, whether that is Mastodon.social or TruthSocial, someone is capable of pulling censorship strings post-facto.
Nope on both counts. It’s about as centralized and censored as the World Wide Web, which is to say, it really isn’t.
Don’t want censorship? Sign up for an instance that doesn’t have any, just like you’d sign up for a permissive web host. Did they engage in some mild censorship that cut you off from an extremist instance? You can still follow anyone you like anyway. Did they pull the rug on you and start censoring beyond what you’re okay with? Just migrate your Mastodon acc
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"Just migrate" is hard to do if you have an established following. A fully decentralized system is basically the same option you're proposing at the very end, everyone sets up their own 'server' and can decide who they want to follow, regardless of where the data currently lives or whether the admin of the 'server instance' has been jailed for subversion in his country.
It is basically Mastodon taken to the individual level, not sure why any level of central control or co-dependent curation would be acceptab
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"Just migrate" is hard to do if you have an established following.
Why do you think that? An instance migration is admittedly not the simplest thing ever, but it automatically updates your followers to point at your new instance. Doesn’t matter how many followers you have.
not sure why any level of central control or co-dependent curation would be acceptable to anyone given this model exists.
For the same reason that most of us here don’t actually host our own email or domain, even though we have the technical ability to do so. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze for 99.999% of people. Centralizing allows us to share a system’s costs across a population, putting it within