Most people agree that Social Media is broken and that we need to find new solutions. Max DeMarco embarked on a journey to find out more about a new invention called NOSTR. This is his documentary about that journey and his interview with key players.
I’ve actually been on Nostr myself a few months (and did my own video about it). As with most alternative networks, you see who you put in your feed.
Watch at https://youtu.be/aA-jiiepOrE
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My own anthropological pet theory.
Dunbar’s number is the concept that a person can only have so many meaningful relationships. Another way of thinking about it is that we, as a species, feel most comfortable in tribes with a certain number of people.
Which makes sense. I hated, hated the little rednecky town that I grew up in. But when I moved to a larger city, the first few weeks were spent overcoming the loneliness of not knowing everybody around me.
What massive online social media does is essentially short circuit the behavior that we developed when we began urbanizing.
Now a person can be a member of twenty tribes without ever needing to leave their homes. If we are, in fact, only capable of a finite number of close friendships then every close relationship that you have online is energy that won’t be spent on a physical one.
True story: I left Facebook in 2016. I had been miserable but didn’t even think to relate the two. About a month after I jumped ship I got adopted by a group of fellow nerds nearing midlife. We hang out at least twice per week. Pub trivia, bowling, hiking. Those interactions are so much more meaningful than anything you can get on social media. By our nature, humans crave physical company.
Social media isn’t going to “break” us. But, if nothing changes, it will further dramatically alter society.
Well I’m on 17 social networks but yes it does not make me suddenly happier. But like alcohol, fear of heights, firearms, etc I think social media affects different people in different ways. I use them more for sharing knowledge than any actual “friendships”.
Nostr? Isn’t that just for crypto bros, Nazis, and Jack Dorseys?
I checked it out once and the chats I dropped into were all about people giving each other “sats” (nanobitcoins) and there were also some far-right weirdos.
Conceptually it seems kinda neat but if somebody says they’re a big fan of nostr I’m gonna wonder about them
Yes, it does have Sats if you want to use those to get tips. But it is not required in any way to use the network. What you see depends on who you follow. So I don’t follow Jack. For those who want to tip, or receive, Sats is better tan using your own credit card I reckon.
Lol no I’m not buying cryptocurrency so I can give or receive microdollars for tweets
Which issue are they trying to solve? The censoring and control issue goes away with federated systems but there is the cost of having a running network. The corporate networks charge you the fee of personal info so it doesn’t cost actually money.
In all honesty the biggest issue I see is that social media eventually leads to us seeing what most of society is really like… boring, bigoted and stupid. This exists everywhere, it’s only that smaller networks like Lemmy just dont have the numbers to make those issues be so prominent.
… social media eventually leads to us seeing what most of society is really like… boring, bigoted and stupid.
Reminds me a little bit of Tragedy of the commons.
Which issue are they trying to solve?
Right? Stuff from the “old days” is still popular and usable. We can still email people, create private groups on WhatsApp/Signal/whatever to avoid algorithms, and subscribe to blogs by RSS (or email newsletter if unsupported, usually). In fact, it’s never been easier.
- many people have handheld computers in their pocket at all times
- Signal et al. are free and the apps are great. Remember paying per message?
- Mobile data plans are getting cheaper
- Many independent email providers with very high reliability
Just delete Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, whatever and move on.
Well, I’d certainly see it still more like ActivityPub. Only different is there are no actual login servers. You get 8 default relay servers that help relay your messages, and there are over 200 I think. Nostr is a different way of doing ActivityPub, but your identity stays with you (not on a server). A week after I tried it, I did this video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mSyMCJlSwA trying to explain some of the differences and similarities (like I did before for Lemmy, Mastodon, etc).
Sure there are differences but my question was really about what the new problem they are trying to solve. The local storage of your identity seems to he that big thing and I wonder who was asking for this. Seems like more of a nuisance than anything else, having to manage that data yourself.
