We need some of these things to evolve and interoperate. Nostr is nice but a bit stuck being a crypto block chain thingy for people who are really into that. It has no user base worth speaking off outside that crowd. Bluesky is mainly a thing that people talk about rather than join. And it has the Twitter founder backing it, which means it gets a lot of people at least a bit curious.
Mastodon is a bit like email. Not great but it works right now and is reasonably easy to get into and integrate with. The feddiverse is bigger than Mastodon. But it's mainly Mastodon. And Threads soon apparently. Millions of people daily active on it. Not quite critical mass yet but closer than most other things have gotten since Twitter started imploding. Good enough?
IMHO mastodon with signed content and per user key pairs would make a lot of sense and it should not be that hard to add it. Why is this not a thing? Just like using pgp makes a lot of sense for email. Except that never happened either. Already when I started using email in the mid nineties, some people were insisting on using pgp. That's thirty years ago and it was only some people. It remains very uncommon for people to use that. Key management is an obstacle. Techies get it. Everybody else doesn't.
> Nostr is nice but a bit stuck being a crypto block chain thingy for people who are really into that
Just to be clear, nostr doesn't directly require the blockchain for anything. It has a nice integration with lightning payments, but that's optional.
> Bluesky is mainly a thing that people talk about rather than join. And it has the Twitter founder backing it
Pretty sure that's not really true anymore. Jack Dorsey has apparently moved on to nostr, interestingly enough.
> IMHO mastodon with signed content and per user key pairs would make a lot of sense and it should not be that hard to add it. Why is this not a thing?
There's some work in this area[0], but I agree it's surprising this wasn't baked into the protocol from the beginning. Same thing with signed requests. Things have de facto evolved in that directly, but we seem stuck at a local optima using a 5yo version of the HTTP signatures spec (see discussion here[1]), which is really confusing for new implementors as well.
Ultimately I think a lot has been learned from implementing ActivityPub in the wild, but I feel it badly needs a version 2.0, and even then I'm not convinced all the most important lessons have been learned yet. For example, it's very concerning to me that Mastodon still doesn't provide an easy way to bring your own domain to any instance.
> Mastodon is a bit like email. Not great but it works right now and is reasonably easy to get into and integrate with. The feddiverse is bigger than Mastodon. But it's mainly Mastodon. And Threads soon apparently. Millions of people daily active on it. Not quite critical mass yet but closer than most other things have gotten since Twitter started imploding. Good enough?
I gather that bitcoin people are currently on a kind of PR campaign to differentiate themselves from 'crypto', but to be clear, to anyone outside that niche, bitcoin is crypto.
Mastodon is a bit like email. Not great but it works right now and is reasonably easy to get into and integrate with. The feddiverse is bigger than Mastodon. But it's mainly Mastodon. And Threads soon apparently. Millions of people daily active on it. Not quite critical mass yet but closer than most other things have gotten since Twitter started imploding. Good enough?
IMHO mastodon with signed content and per user key pairs would make a lot of sense and it should not be that hard to add it. Why is this not a thing? Just like using pgp makes a lot of sense for email. Except that never happened either. Already when I started using email in the mid nineties, some people were insisting on using pgp. That's thirty years ago and it was only some people. It remains very uncommon for people to use that. Key management is an obstacle. Techies get it. Everybody else doesn't.