Did something happen with it recently? I ask because of this post/meme: lemmy.ca/post/69868615
nostr seems cool but its like twitter or mastadon in method of working from what I can tell and I like the forum type.
How does Nostr work, and what are the pros/cons compared to ActivityPub?
Submitted 2 weeks ago by otter@lemmy.ca to [deleted]
Comments
HubertManne@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
mike_wooskey@lemmy.thewooskeys.com 2 weeks ago
I’ve tested using nostr and it seems cool (I love decentralization), but I don’t really know what it is. Your question made me curious about the differences between nostr and activitypub, so I asked my AI.
I thought the response was useful so I’ll paste it here. If you don’t like AI responses, stop reading this post here.
I asked: Explain the main differences and similarities between nostr and activitypub.
Qwen-3. 8 said: Both are open, JSON-based protocols for decentralized social media, but they take opposite ends of the design spectrum.
TL;DR: Nostr is a minimal client↔relay broadcast protocol where you are your keypair. ActivityPub is a heavy server↔server federation protocol where servers host accounts and talk to each other.
Main differences
Nostr ActivityPub Architecture Client ↔ many relays (star topology). Relays are dumb stores/forwarders that never sync with each other Server ↔ server mesh. Servers discover each other (WebFinger) and exchange activities directly via HTTP Identity secp256k1 keypair — your public key is your identity, hosted nowhere URL-based account ( @you@instance.social) hosted and controlled by a serverComplexity Tiny: WebSocket + signed JSON “events” + Schnorr signatures. Trivially easy to implement Heavy: JSON-LD, Activity Streams 2.0 objects, HTTP signatures, inboxes/outboxes, WebFinger Data model Flat events (kind + tags + content), semantics defined by NIPs Rich typed objects (Person, Note, Follow, Like, Collection, …) Moderation Almost none built in — spam filtering is client-side or per-relay policy Per-instance moderation: reports, blocks, instance-level blocklists Discovery No native user search (NIP-05 vanity mapping, directory relays) WebFinger, search endpoints, follow graphs Media Not in core — external links or NIP-94 metadata Native images, video, polls, boosts Censorship resistance High — anyone can run a relay; clients fetch from many so content is globally replicated Lower — each server is a full trust domain; your account and content live or die with it Maturity New (2023), fast-moving, experimental (Presto, Amethyst, Snort, nostr.band) W3C standard (2018), large ecosystem (Mastodon, Pleroma/Akkoma, Misskey, PeerTube, Lemmy) One nuance: Nostr isn’t really “federation” at all — there’s no server-to-server sync. It’s a publish/subscribe model where your client aggregates multiple relays. ActivityPub is true server-to-server federation.
Similarities
- Both are open specs for decentralized social media, both JSON-based, both self-hostable
- Both are protocol-first: any client can read any node — any Nostr client works against any relay, any ActivityPub app can follow any ActivityPub account
- Both support the core loop: follows, posts, replies, likes
- Both use cryptographic signatures (Nostr: Schnorr per event; ActivityPub: HTTP signatures per request)
- Both struggle with spam/abuse, just at different layers
- Both expanded beyond microblogging: Nostr into chat, marketplaces, payments (LNURL); ActivityPub into forums (Lemmy) and video (PeerTube)
Rough heuristic: Nostr optimizes for simplicity, portability, and censorship resistance at the cost of moderation and discovery. ActivityPub optimizes for a mature, moderate-able social graph at the cost of complexity and server lock-in.
hexagonwin@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
btw there’s a spoiler tag on lemmy that can be useful for this sorta stuff
mike_wooskey@lemmy.thewooskeys.com 2 weeks ago
Oh! Thanks!
sbeak@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
I don’t know the specifics, but ActivityPub has been around longer, so there are larger, stronger communities around compared to the newer kid on the block. You have lots of different services that use the ActivityPub protocol (Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, Frendica, etc.), all of which have had a lot of time to mature and fix issues, add features, etc. Nostr almost certainly doesn’t have the same yet.
For that reason alone, I would rather use ActivityPub services for now!
mrdown@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I stopped on the account creator. It asking to use an extension and public secret key bullshit to create an account
dsilverz@catodon.rocks 2 weeks ago
I tried Nostr some time ago, but I didn't stick much long. As far as I'm able to tell, there are lots of functionality, but there's a very serious downside: its userbase, mostly comprised of "anarcho"-capitalists, cryptobros, anti-vaxxers and climate change denialists (and literal flat-Earthers), misogynists, white supremacists, etc... but they swear they don't like the orange turd, but they share the same... erm... "moral values"; it's the so-called "alt-right", ergo, Nostr is mostly a nazi bar. Hence why I didn't stick. Oh, and there's a lot of spamming from bots, as well as the so-called "agentic AIs" (OpenClaw) posting as they farm Bitcoin (more on the latter later).
If it weren't for the toxic userbase, the technical features are surely interesting.
In a nutshell, relays are to Nostr as instances are to the Fediverse, except one has to use apps (e.g. Amethyst) as the front-end, as relays won't necessarily provide a full-fledged Web UI like Fediverse instances do. Unsurprisingly (given how it's mostly comprised of cryptobros) it got a native support to Bitcoin "lightning transactions" (one can "zap" a Nostr event, i.e. proceed with a microtransaction transferring Satoshis to the author of the Nostr event). Also unsurprisingly, most relays are paid ("something something no free lunch").
Relays and apps may or may not implement certain NIPs (Nostr Implementation Protocol? I'm writing from memory so I'm not sure of the acronym). E.g. there's a NIP for long-form content (blogging), a NIP for videos, a NIP for marketplace (akin to craigslist/Facebook Marketplace), a NIP for communities (akin to Lemmy communities), etc... Think of NIPs as plug-ins rather than things imbued into the platform, which (differently from the Fediverse) allows for adding features without having all relays and apps to implement the same features. Every event has one or more NIPs, and it's up to the relay to accept or refuse it depending on which NIPs the relay is configured to allow, and it's up to the app to display a given event depending on which NIPs the app implements.
In this sense, DMs are also a NIP, and I guess there are more than one kind of DM system. There are certain implementations using the notes NIP (iirc it's NIP 01, the most basic kind of event and mostly supported across relays and apps) to transmit base64-encoded payloads of some kind of E2EE message, and it's so poorly implemented that it spams the global feed.
Nostr relays can be self-hosted just like Fediverse instances, but one can use multiple relays simultaneously in order to get a broader reach (think of having alt-accounts across different Fediverse instances and crossposting, except all alt-accounts have the exact same handle and ID because Nostr handles are Nostr-global nprofile123abcdef... addresses).
There's more to it, but my reply is already lengthy, so you can AMA if something isn't covered by the afore explanations as I did use Nostr (and ended up not staying due to its userbase, but used it nevertheless so I got some hands-on experience).
!nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
otter@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
That was a very helpful deep dive, thank you for taking the time to write it :)