Martin has a quick “early thoughts”–style review of NOSTR.
Good review. My first introduction to NOSTR gave it a little bit of an unfair impression. One of the worst harassers on the internet was pushing NOSTR as “so censorship proof and so awesome” so I was like “uh nope, the fact that there is instance level moderation on ActivityPub is what’s awesome”. And it is. Being on a mid-size ActivityPub instance where there are caring and good moderators seems great. All the users can benefit of those moderators’ hard work. (Overly big ones are often undermoderated so they’re no good. On small ones, like mine, you need to do everything yourself which is bad but the upside is you’re responsible for the welfare of fewer people so that lessens the burden.)
Anyway, what I got wrong, or so I hope because I haven’t triple checked, is that there still are relays and the relays can still moderate. But you get the union of posts from the relays you’re on. Whereas on ActivityPub you get the union-of-intersections. On ActivityPub, posts that are legal on your federated instances and your local instance, those are the ones you see.
On NOSTR there can still be moderation (and that’s a good thing) but you get everything that either of your instances allow. So let’s say you’re on one NOSTR instance that ban racist posts but allow pro-skub posts, and another instance that also ban racist posts but allow anti-skub posts, you get the full spectrum of the skub debate but you don’t have to see any racist posts. Or if you hate skub you don’t have to subscribe to the pro-skub one and no-one’s forcing you to see those posts.
At least I hope that’s how it works—corrections welcome!
If that’s right, that doesn’t sound too bad.
Now, the problem still remains that people can put up harassment instances and have harassment conversations and write mean comments to and/or about you and that sucks but Fedi has the exact same problem.
Fedi is even worse in one regard; I found out that on Akkoma, if I just “block” someone, I’m still hosting their posts and while I can’t see those posts myself, if someone else visits my Akkoma instance, even when they’re not logged in, they’ll see those posts. They can still see them. I only hid them from myself, I’m still providing rent-free webhosting to them. (The fix for that on Akkoma is to go into the user list and “delete” the user as if it were a local user.)
Even if I do scrub them off my own instance, they can still have their own li’l 2minute hate sessions on their own server (“authorized fetch” mitigates this somewhat). Something recent versions of Mastodon and Akkoma afford and encourage even more with the awful “quote tweet” functionality, probably better known as “hey let’s all discuss this dumb post I found”–mode.