On one hand I agree with you on the "protocol not platform" ideal (and thanks for linking nostr, hadn't seen it before), but on the other I guess I still don't understand why so many are committed to the best way to go about that involving "relays" / federation.

RSS solved the "you fully own the content, everyone else can discover it via a well-known protocol" problem decades ago! Is it just that stuff like comments and reactions would be harder with just RSS?

No thanks. Social networks are non essential. Twitter and Substack Notes can go away tomorrow and no one will bat an eyelid. In these cases, people just want to go to a website or a mobile app, click around and have some foolish fun for sometime. Banking networks need protocols, not social media, which is intrinsically about dumb fun. That is why Mastodon and these things will never be as popular.

You seem to have no recollection of how Twitter has played an outsized role in fast reporting on breaking events, such as the Arab Spring.

I watched the arab spring unfold on aljazeera's livestream, what was going on with twitter?

Every time I have seen any form of social media/platform/forum/whatever put "free speech" and anti-censorship as their primary goals, it always ends the same way - hate speech, antisemitism, racism, sexism, etc.

Whether by design or because such sites just attract those kind of individuals, that's not good for a couple of key reasons:

1: Those kinds of interactions turn away many potential users

2: It makes advertising basically impossible (No potential advertiser wants to be associated with that kind of site)

There's a good reason that as sites like Reddit got larger, they started to clamp down on less desirable content.

And any form of social media with no advertising is always going to be very tiny and niche, and in general likely to die out quickly.

Nostr is the real deal.

I first heard about nostr last in November when Twitter tried to ban it. There's an incredible dev ecosystem developing — so much so that I decided to rebuild Satellite (https://satellite.earth) the social platform I'd been working on to become a client for the protocol.

There's a bunch of other clients too. Someone started a directory here https://www.nostrapps.com/

I'm happy to answer technical questions about nostr if anyone is curious.

The big downside with Nostr is it’s not built on the web. With blogs and webmention the feeds are websites. And there’s already a huge ecosystem for blogs. I’d prefer people build on that instead. Especially if the end result is more or less the same: blogs with comments.

There isn't a huge amount of demand for 'censorship resistance' and 'free speech' in social networks.

People want enjoyable communities far more than they want the 'freedom' to spam the n-word.

On the contrary, I think there is a huge demand. I can find enjoyable community offline. Speaking for myself, freedom from censorship is in fact the main thing I want in a social network. Your values might differ.

I think you're missing the point. I understand that you value that. There is no question of that.

The majority of people however don't value it or actively desire it because no wants to live in a pigsty. There is a reason apps like Truth Social don't take off, and that 4chan never gained the mainstream popularity of other social sites.

There have been multiple reddit clones, multiple twitter clones, multiple social media clones all based on the false pretense that there is demand for a freeze peach social site, and they all fall flat. Mastodon is doing better than most and its gaining users because of Twitter catering to the alt-right and refusing to censor offensive or dangerous speech.

Dangerous speech?

Yes, if you go back and take a gander at US history, you'll learn that there is a long history of restricting speech that is likely to cause another person harm.

Is that something you are unaware of?

You're still looking at this from a legalistic perspective.

I'm not looking at it from a 'legalistic' perspective. I was elaborating for you because you seemed confused or uncertain about what dangerous speech was.

ok :)