MapReduce is term pertaining to a software data retrieval architecture/process (also known as divide-and-conquer). The simple version is that instead of asking one super big database that knows "everything" you ask multiple smaller databases the same question i.e. "what all posts do you have from bob@domain.com?" (this is "mapping" a query to mutliple sources) and each database returns 0 or more results, then the query interface joins the results together ("reduce") to a single response. This is common in "big data" because you can more efficiently optimize the query by parallelizing it across many machines/workers/nodes. There are additional optimizations that can be implemented such as caching common queries or data-sharding (items a-f on node 1, items g - k on node 2...).

I don't think Nostr protocol is immune to the development of big centralized popular instances. Especially if something like Threads integrates and becomes the "default" client with millions of users over night. Users, in general, will always gravitate towards content and community. But, I think Nostr has a slight edge over ActivityPub in handling that problem by the user having no direct dependence on any one particular host.

I'll have to read more into the Nostr protocol specifically as it pertains to privacy, tracking and content injection (ads).

I'm by no means an authority on ActivityPub nor Nostr, I apologize if that may have been surmised. I too am just chatting.

Thanks, this is exactly what I've been thinking about as I've become more familiar with Fediverse protocols and applications.

I don’t know anything about it, just found that to be a weird aspect to market on the home page.

The first thing I thought of is that many times complaining about censorship is a dog whistle by people who just want to spew hateful opinions.

Didn’t mean to imply anything about the protocol itself, I don’t have any tangible evidence of anything negative about the protocol or people maintaining it.

I don't care for extremes of either persuasion, or the usdefaultusm of Reddit. Superior tech technology has absolutely no guarantee of success: Betamax was the better technically I'm told.

It's Lemmy that's getting all the airplay on Reddit, scarcely a mention of Nostr I've seen. Nostr Amethyst app on Android seems to work very snappily, but numbers may dictate.

It's this messy [ find working instance - have instance declared verboten - repeat ] Lemmy cycle that's really starting to annoy me. Had it happen three times so far. I'm going to put some serious effort into publicising Nostr once I've played with it, if only to even the fight.

I think you can find extremists on all platforms. But the thing that really turned me off is that 9/10 posts had to do with crypto. It’s just not my bag, and the folks on Nostr embrace it (even the platform itself, allowing bitcoin payments over the lightning network).