They don’t accept that, that I see. Show me wrong.

The point I was trying to make is that there is no “it.” It’s a collection of specifications built around an extremely minimalist protocol for a distributed, federated system of nodes. The biggest network happens to be swarming with an array of people with questionable or outright objectionable ethics, but there’s no reason why an alternative network of connected nodes with different values can’t grow.

I really like Nostr for its simplicity and lightweight nature. It’s super easy to run a node, and can easily be done in a minimal VPS with almost no disk, memory, or compute. Messages are lightweight (not being based in a heavy container like XML), so even with message caching, it sips disk space. There are a bunch of useful extensions (and some that people are going to object to, light the cryptocurrency extension), but these are all optional and enabling them is nearly always a runtime configuration option if the server supports it.

There are dozens on servers, and as many clients. Interacting with it reminds me off early HTTP, when you could reasonably telnet in to a servers, type a couple of lines of a header, and get a response. It’s absolutely delightful.

The only thing we lack is a coordinated list of alt-nodes that don’t federate with the biggest node network containing the crypto and alt-right[1]. Maybe I should start a list; I dread having to curate it against trolls, though.

[1] I hate that crypto has become so closely associated with the alt-right, because there’s a lot of positive theory behind it. Cryptographically auditable public ledgers are a really useful tool. An alternative financial system owned by the participants and not by a single centralized regime is a great idea. It was a decentralized, federated financial system before “federation” became a movement, and it is ironic that the strongest criticisms come from proponents of decentralization and federation. Proof of work turned out to be a really poor design choice, but I don’t know why any leftist would argue that - in theory - a system that supports virtual trading tokens which is not under the control of a Central Bank is worse than our current surveillance-state, KYC financial system. And there are cryptocoins that use a consensus mechanism other than proof-of-work (2), and which consume less energy than all of the servers running federated systems like Lemmy and Mastodon.

Sorry about the crypto rant. The fact that crypto - which already had issues - has become associated with the alt-right really bothers me. The knee-jerk distain because of environmental impact was one thing, because although it’s not the whole story, most coins are based on POW and do have a horrible carbon footprint. And there’s a bunch of graft in the space; it has problems, but those are solvable. Well, you can’t “solve” graft, any more than you can “solve” CP on the internet; but the carbon footprint issue isn’t a fundamental component of cryptocoins - unfortunately just the most popular ones. But the lean to the right on the part of the broader crypto community celebrities is really disheartening.