For those who recently joined the digital frontier, there’s a common misconception that Nostr’s decentralization is the key to true freedom in technology. But, in reality, it’s a big myth.
The web technologies that truly grant us unparalleled freedom have been at our disposal since 1999. We’re talking about web servers, HTTP(s), blog content management systems, and ping APIs.
Nostr, for all its buzz, essentially offers the same capabilities as 𝕏 – posting text and media. Its only novelty is the ability to send Sats to posts via Lightning, zaps – a feature that could be integrated as a CMS plugin, and it’s not an exclusive feature of Nostr.
Discoverability:
Nostr falls significantly short compared to 𝕏 when it comes to discovering and following other accounts. 𝕏 excels in this regard. However, weblogs had their trends and recommendations, too. Dedicated server apps provided this feature, and it was genuinely decentralized. You had the power to choose which one to use and decide to opt in or out by adjusting a ping setting in your CMS. You could even choose not to appear on any trend lists – that’s real control.
Now, Nostr clients are scrambling to replicate these features at the client level, but there’s no way to opt out.
Full Control Over Your Data:
Speaking of control, here’s another myth about Nostr – you don’t have full control over your data there. Your posts are stored in relays, which may not keep your posts forever. To safeguard against this, you’ll need to run your own relay or pay for a service that manages it for you. Surprisingly, only a few people are aware of this, and many may be shocked to find their earliest posts missing after a decade.
Full control doesn’t just mean being resistant to censorship; it also entails the ability to delete what you’ve posted, also known as ‘the right to be forgotten.’ This is considered a fundamental right on the web.
On Nostr, you’re at the mercy of relays when it comes to deleting your posts. With hundreds of relays synchronizing with each other, if even one doesn’t comply with your deletion request, your post lingers out there.
On 𝕏, you can hide or delete your post. But can you be certain it’s erased everywhere? From their other data storages and backups? At least you can conceal it from search engines and web archives, a luxury not offered on Nostr.
Weblogs:
When it comes to real control over your data, it’s hard to beat self-hosted weblogs run by open-source CMS. You have control over your server, .htaccess, robots.txt, CMS, and database – encompassing creation, modification, storage, backup, and deletion of your data. This level of control remains unchallenged to this day.
Conclusion:
Open-source CMS-driven self-hosted weblogs already provide us with maximum data control and freedom. So why the reliance on relays now? Convenience, as someone rightly pointed out when I raised the same question on Nostr (the irony).
But let’s not forget, it was convenience that lured users to centralized social media platforms, causing them to relinquish freedom and control. Nostr’s decentralization may be a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t encompass the full range of what the internet has to offer.
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