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Why ActivityPub over Nostr? - function only
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this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2025
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I moved away from centralised social media, because social media owned by multinational corporations benefit from bigotry and rage, and so allow it to fester and grow. They do this by under moderating, or moderating with a bias against the people being harassed and attacked.
So the last thing I would choose to do is go to a platform/network that prides itself on lack of moderation, and requires vulnerable, targeted folk to play whack a mole, with each person having to reactively block individual bigots, one by one, after they've appeared and dumped their payload of hate.
The hierarchy of moderation we have here is an underrated feature
I've read somewhere that the fediverse has the most moderators per user of any social network because of it's decentralized nature. Can't find the source right now though.
So there are no moderation tools / whitelist/blacklists?
In theory yes, in practice, no.
Nostr uses relays. In some ways, a relay is like an instance on the fediverse. Where they differ though, is that a) relays don't talk to each other and b) users can sign up to many different relays and pull/push content to all of them.
So in practice, in order to see a wide amount of content, you need to end up connecting to multiple relays. And even though a relay does have some moderation capabilities to block content, unless every relay you use blocks the content from the bigoted account, you'll see it.
If you signed up only to a single relay, and that relay had good moderation, then in theory, your Nostr experience wouldn't be terrible, but a single niche relay like that will mean you see basically no content. And as soon as you connect to a larger public relay to get more content, you lose all of the moderation advantages offered by your first instance. Which means in practice, there is no incentive to run a well moderated instance.
And so all of the moderation ends up on the end user, who has to manually block accounts only after they appear and dump their load of hate (at which point, the bigot will just spin up another account). Some people prefer that experience, but when you're the regular target of hate, that approach just doesn't work for many folk.
This is a good thing: bitches need to learn words are harmless & they can ignore them like humanity has done for millennia. It's not built into the servers. Client-side tooling would handle it, so it's entirely at the discretion of the user, which seems better to me.
It's not about that even if you reduce it to purely that. Without moderation every platform becomes infested by spammers, trolls, astroturfers. Topical communities lose focus and communities become little more than hashtags.
Yup, better. Moderation should be opt-in & is better handled at the client: the user could opt-in to a "moderation community" that publishes tags their client would follow. Such curation for anyone who wants that is a better idea. Far better than moderators we don't get to choose.
Why is that better?
Debateable given that any community anywhere online still needs to remove CSAM and gore and other things.
And what do you mean by "tags" here? Just hashtags or something else? Because a hashtag under a no-moderation concept could still be hijacked.
Well I suggest you go there then, because the fediverse will never be what you want it to be.
Legal compliance is different from legally unnecessary moderation.
Not really: Nostr content is cryptographically signed. User's client subscribes to some content curators who post as signed events their tags for other events. The client processes these tagging events to filter according to the user's preferences.
Some proposals already exist:
Not the topic of discussion, which is function & protocol.
Right, so there would still need to be moderators. And if they can remove that, they can remove anything.
Right, but you're just gunna have an unpleasant time here if you loath all moderation. It's that simple.
That's why there's no limit on the number of relays (events usually publish to multiple) or subscriptions to them (clients usually subscribe to multiple).
Still off topic, and the moderators here aren't reddit moderator scum so far. The modlog offers decent transparency.