Nevertheless, summed up, my initial impression of the network was that most apps felt clunky, or underdeveloped. I felt like the audience was mostly Bitcoin _obsessed _people, with mixtures of the political right and left, all of which who're enthusiastic about not being censored, or banned for what they say. You know, because humans make mistakes, and sometimes our ideas are different than that of which someone else might hold. As it is, and as it goes.

A month ago, I was bewildered, I didn't really know what to think, but ... I was at least a little intrigued. I wanted to explore, and meet people, and figure it out.

My findings were that, despite the semi-lack of data privacy (anyone can use your npub to see what your personal timeline looks like), and the fact that blocking is a bit harder (a thing that's also kind of a problem on Mastodon and Bluesky, anyway), Nostr is an example of actual decentralization. Decentralization, despite it being kind of ... looked down upon by masses of people outside the network.

Which ... is weird. You would think people on Bluesky, who are also enthusiastic about decentralization, would realize that the busky devs are lying to them about what their motives and what decentralization is, and are. And you'd think, some people would look at Mastodon and go, "You know, this place is cool ... but I kinda hate losing all of my posts if some totalitarian admin decides to kill my account? And that my only option is to buy a server and host my own? If I never want to be banned _again? _And then networks of instances can form a secret cabal to silence my entire server, anyway?"

You would think by now, many, many people would be tired of the looming threat of a banning. Or is it just me?

I've talked about my exploration of the protocol on all these networks, to comments like, "Isn't that purely a right wing social network?" or "Why are you hanging out with Jack?"

And, I didn't really know what to say? Of course I don't know Jack, and yeah I've seen plenty right wing postrs, but I've also definitely seen plenty of left wing people. It's almost like, people do what they want, regardless of the ideas they hold, and the opinions of others. At least, sometimes.

Speaking of, my experience hasn't been completely perfect. I've had some trolls, some nasty people dump into my notifications, and they weren't even all that particularly nasty. But it made me step back and go, "You know, I can't block these people, am I sure about all this?" And because of that, I sort of stepped away for a while. I had a real big think while I continued my postings on the other networks. I tried to think about why I'm on social media.

Obviously, I do things. I make music. I write. These are things I want to share with people, but I'm also here to meet people, to make connections, and even sometimes, to network? I know a lot of people out there are fortunate enough to have landed into something they love doing, or actually want to do with the rest of their lives, and that's fantastic. But, what I want to do is so unconventional that it only makes sense that I reach out, and explore.

What is it I want to do? I wanna be a creator, but not just some influencer on Instagram, or some Youtuber who spends eight years building up one hundred thousand followers. Nah.

I just wanna make a career out of using what I know how to do, to inform, and entertain. That's it. And hey, maybe I can do that on Nostr, as it builds and expands.

And that's part of why I came back. That's part of why I bought into Alby, and now apparently also run a cloud node. A Node Runner, like a netrunner, but with less hacking people's brains to make their eyes melt.

I mean ... it is really cool that the whole protocol is connected across this network, where each instance of Nostr can be a completely different piece of software, for different things, like blogging, live-streaming, selling merch, or even a forum, and you can just log in with your address. Dude. It's like what Mastodon set out to be from the start, but hasn't quite made it there yet.

I fully believe Mastodon is being stifled by its creator, who's more concerned with impressing potential investors than with making something great. Which, is a shame.

But the future of the internet and social media _will always be _a future that is owned by the people, run by the people, developed by the people. Because algorithms, engagement baiting, and ad pushing will only ever go so far, until the very last person left standing on these aforementioned networks finally goes, "Man, this fuckin' sucks." And leaves.

How do I feel about Nostr, a month later? I feel conflicted, I feel like it's great, and I feel unsure. But I feel like it's definitely something. Something worth continuing to pay attention to, as the rest of the social web vies for control of everyone else's attention.

So, let's talk about the shooter-grinder that maybe started it all.

This story goes back all the way to 2014, around a year after Warframe had originally released. I was dating a locksmith at the time. Not very integral to the story, because her being a locksmith has nothing to do with Warframe ... It was just, you know, the biggest thing I remember about her (aside from, a year later, telling me she didn't think I was dating material). But, she was staying at my place, and I remember distinctly waking up in the morning to her, on my PC, playing this weird ... ninja space game. It had almost no features, no story, and really all you did was click a mission, then shoot things, and then pick up some loot. Wash, rinse, repeat.

There were no flying ship animations, no rotating solar maps, nothing.

I got into it for about a week or so before I realized I couldn't really take playing a game that was technically in open beta, or even alpha? I don't remember. So, I dropped it. I would revisit it again and again, shooting things, leveling up, and then losing motivation. Until suddenly, one day, the star map was moving, and you could see the ship you were on flying to those missions.

Amazing.

But I kept going in and out of it like tossing out pairs of socks. At least until around 2016 when an online friend convinced me to join her, because there was some ridiculous mission we had to do called "the Second Dream."

Let's just say, it blew me away. Finally. A character creator? And, a **story? **Albeit, you're some kind of Stranger Things-esque powerful teenager who pilots these metal space ninjas, but it was something. Evangelion, maybe.

I spent a week figuring out what all was new, ran around with my new human legs, found an open world thing on Earth ...

Yeah, I left the game again ... until 2018, and the Fortuna update. Needless to say, I was blown away, again. And, after getting frustrated that I couldn't just have the cool new guns and my own hoverboard in a reasonable amount of time ... I left.

This basically is the theme behind my relationship with Digital Extremes and Warframe. I'm the rubber-band player. Getting real excited about all the honestly really cool stuff, and revolutionary storytelling, and then having my motivation riddled with bullets and swords when faced with the prospect of having to spend time collecting things and grinding reputation.

The cycle begins again.

It's 2024, and I'm back in Warframe, enticed by some wild new expansion announcement that apparently takes you back to ... 1999??? HUH?

So, I'm swallowing the grind pill, and I'm doing it. Knocking every mission out, one by one, and I'm almost to the New War.

But, here are my feelings about Warframe, all these years later.

A space ninja MMO is freaking awesome. I have like, 20 different warframes, and some of them I've never even tried. I'm account level 8, almost 9, and I'm working on upgrading my own massive capital ship (called a Railjack). The story is gripping, wild, and probably some of the best writing I've ever seen in a game, and I cannot wait to get through to more recent content.

But, despite swallowing that pill, and despite working through toward what I want, that's the one problem that remains with Warframe. The game absolutely disrespects your time as a human being.

The Second War: Hey buddy, you need a Railjack and a Necramech before you can continue the story. Frikken' scrub.

Okay, so I have the Railjack, in which you use to engage in space combat that isn't all that much unlike combat in No Man's Sky. But ... the Necramech? Oh ... Oh, you gotta grind a bunch of materials on the dead moon Deimos before you can build it?

Queue the internal screaming. This is why I've left the game 40 times since 2014. I'm not a fan of grinding. I have a full-time job, I have extracurricular things I like to do with my time. Spending hours upon hours collecting materials, so I can build a mech, so I can engage in yet another form of combat, so I can continue the masterfully crafted storyline ... it seems to me like needless barriers to get to what you actually want.

The GAME.

But, sure, I mean, yeah. They need hooks to keep you playing, because if you blast through the storyline, and you don't have to do anything else, you lose your player base. I just wish grinding didn't feel like I suddenly had a second job. But ... I'M GONNA DO IT. I'm not quitting this time.

For real.

If you wanna help me out, my account name is CMDR_N0va.

My overall feelings on Warframe are that it's probably one of the best games ever made, that kind of annoys the absolute hell out of me ... at times.

The question remains: Why haven't we been able to take this history with us ... if every instance you've ever been federated with is keeping that data.

What do I mean by this?

Every single time you post on Mastodon, your words get pushed out to other instances (servers), and in order for people to be able to read what you said, a copy of it is downloaded onto that server. It does this very quickly, so quick that it seems as though it happens in real-time. And, for all intents and purposes, I'm not inclined to believe that it doesn't.

If you've ever had an account on an instance that isn't mastodon.social, and you have a posting history, and you remember your username: Go over to mastodon.social, create a burner account, and then search up that username.

Yeah, you see that? Your entire body of posting-work is still there, even if you deleted your account, even if the instance you were on is long dead.

This is obviously not true for every server. Some choose to delete old content to make space for the new, but there are many Mastodon servers out there retaining everything ever posted, like mastodon.social.

But what point am I trying to get at here? As far as you're probably concerned, even if that data still exists, and your account, and instance does not, you can't access it, right? You can't reclaim everything you've said and done, and put it back where it belongs: Under your ownership.

Or, what if you could?

If you've been following my posting history on here in the past week, I've been screwing around with Nostr, and musing about Bluesky. Two networks using a similar protocol, that I feel are getting the idea of what I'm thinking of here, only about 75% correct.

Bluesky's problem, is that the protocol is owned by ... the owners. The corporation. Your keys report to their server, and in return, so does your content. A central server that has a lot of different keyholes.

Not really the optimal experience, because you can't create your own server, and build your own community, and survive if the main Bluesky datacenter goes out, right? The only thing you can do is host your own software that essentially just holds keys and content, and, as far as I know, all of that will be worthless if the devs ever go offline with the main server.

So then there's Nostr, where all of your data lives everywhere on the network, and as long as you have your keys, you can use any app that utilizes the protocol, and continually access everything you post, forever. You can't be banned, but you also can't block anyone. And any random stranger can take your public key from your profile, and view your entire everything (as I've said before).

I would say this is also not really that optimal. The idea is great, but the execution trades privacy for extreme versatility.

This brings us back to Mastodon, which is still in active development, still receiving new features, and ... well, kind of also only has the whole thing about 75% correct.

There's that last little bit we're missing here.

The user should have the option of a community, a personal community away from what's viewed to be the central Mastodon server and have their privacy, but, they should also be able to retain their posts, and their bookmarks, and their likes, and their lists, and everything else.

How do we accomplish this?

Keys.

The entire fediverse (for the most part) already has all of your content. So, if every user had a key tying them to that content, no matter where you're located, be it mastodon.social, or mkultra.monster, then you could just go wherever you want?

That's the idea, at least.

Your content becomes immortal, immutable, and that's the one missing puzzle piece to ActivityPub. I am 100% sure of this, and I don't know what the developer stance is on the topic of keys and immutable data, but I fully believe this is something that should be on their roadmap. Yes, storage space is a concern ... but holding onto the text content of a post is much easier, and smaller in size, than holding onto larger pieces of data (like photos, and videos). If you scrolled back to five years ago and found something you posted, but the only thing you could see was the text, would you be all that disappointed?

I guess that part is subjective.

Mastodon is already setup nearly identical to Nostr, except users live on the relays. So just ... add user generated keys to the mix, and I am 100% double-dippin' certain that most of the naysayers being spammed by engagement farming on Threads and Twitter will jump ship.

Mark my worms.

If it isn't. Well. They're making a huge mistake.

Recently, I wrote about MiHoYo's latest game, Zenless Zone Zero, a cyberpunk slice and shoot 'em up that absolutely rips ass. But now, I want to talk about the apocalyptic world of Wuthering Waves, where while wandering some desolate canyon, I came face-to-face with this dude on a huge motorcycle from hell that sliced me in half and killed me (okay, not really, but the dude on the bike was definitely there).

First of all, the soundtrack:

https://youtu.be/mglYS2zftVM?si=2qJICXm-JK0fDJIH

This is the music you hear as you're logging on, introduced to the game with something that sounds like it should've been in Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriots. I'm not even sharting you. I think Kuro knew they had fierce competition that's already years down the development line, and they knew they had to immediately capture you with something.

So, they chose violins and a piano.

And then there's the setting ...

The story is about this apocalyptic event called the Lament that wiped out most of humanity, which also caused a whole bunch of monsters to plague the world. You're a person woken from your dreams in search of your lost memories, and ultimately, the goal of beating the "Lament." I think that's about as simple as it can get--A plot you'd expect from maybe Ghost in the Shell, but with swords.

I'm sure there's an anime more suited to compare that to, but my mind is full of fog and hangover pain.

It is, at face value, quite a bit darker, and a little more adult than the bright and cheery high-fantasy world of Genshin Impact.

I've also done a little bit of reading, and some say the story in its current state is very short, but I think that's the way these things go as live service, gacha games that never truly end (plus, Waves just launched). And, as another Breath of the Wild clone, there is surely much more to do than story content.

For example, Somnoire, these supernatural realms of lost dreams that you traverse in a challenge to collect "cards" that power you up in order to ultimately win a reward. In a way, this sort of reminds me of the elemental challenges in Genshin Impact. And, of course, there are tons and tons of world quests that I've yet to explore.

Mostly, though, this write-up is about my initial and beginning impressions in the game
.
Speaking of just having started, my main player character is level 40.

Either I'm totally kicking tons of ass, or this game is more forgiving than Genshin, where I've been meddling in the quests since it launched, and I think my current cast of characters are level 30?

Despite how much I like Genshin, my main issue with it, is that traveling on-foot is slow. And your stamina ... is low.

In Waves, not so much. You can grapple onto hooking points and swing across short distances, and then float around on a glider sorta deal. But, wait, there's more! You can surely climb up the edge of a cliff, but if you hold down the run key, you can also RUN UP THE SIDE OF A CLIFF.

https://youtu.be/BOacUoKZuLc?si=FisIAD3CxaHopyr0

It seems like this game was specifically engineered with exasperated Genshin players in mind. I'm sure a lot of people who play it know, MiHoYo is ... let's just say, not so forgiving. From running around, to pulling for new characters, it takes time. A lot of time. Unless you're extremely lucky, or, spending tons of money (which I refuse to do, I will never spend hundreds in one sitting on a gacha game).

In fact, I jumped back into Genshin after playing Waves for a little bit, and I was taken aback a bit by the fact that your sprint only lasts a very short time, compared to Waves where, in many areas, it's infinite. Imagine that, an open world Breath of the Wild clone that says, "Hey, this is a game where you potentially pay us money for fictional characters, but also, we'll try not to waste your time."

But don't take any of that to sound like I hate Genshin. No, I really enjoy it. It's just that, through spending time with Waves, I've found there are definitely things that could be improved upon. Things that would really only just be a quality of life sort of fix for Genshin. Not that I'm ... that invested in these games. I haven't been really invested in a game since Mass Effect 3 ended.

Everything since then has just been a search for the next greatest thing. Baldur's Gate 3 had that feeling for a while, and then the developers dropped it, decided there would be no DLC or expanded content, and peaced out. And here we have the reason why I'm more tending to play endless open world gacha games than 70 dollar Steam games that end and cease updates and expanded content. The sort of thing that leaves you feeling like the time your girlfriend ghosted you after months of being together with no hint that anything was ever wrong.

Okay, maybe it's not that serious.

All that aside, I haven't really touched on the opening experience in Wuthering Waves.

When you first log in, much like Genshin, you're dropped into this world that, from just camming around, you can see is very large. You're set off on a starting quest, and before you know it, you've seen two cities, a few towns, and fought off the engineer of these weird puppet people. A story quest that feels literally like something out of a show on Crunchyroll (not a sponsored comment).

And, did I mention the combat has almost the exact same dodge mechanics employed in Zenless Zone Zero? I'm not entirely sure how both games managed to have this real clinched, click, dodge, attack sorta mechanic (since they both came out at almost the exact same time), but I enjoy it! Another thing that felt weird going back into Genshin where the dodge amounts to ... just dashing out-of-the-way real fast and sometimes failing to do so.

The only thing that leaves a little to be desired, is the English voice acting. But ... that's kind of an issue in a lot of these games, and I wouldn't say it really takes away from the experience.

Having rambled on enough about this, for now, I think I'd give this game a 7 out of 10 anime girls for the price of 19.99 and a little bit of luck. And I'm cautiously, but optimistically, anticipating new content.

Hold up, haven't I seen this before?

Back in the olden days of gaming o' yore, there was a time when Shephards saved the galaxy, and the Inquisition had only just begun, guards of the veil be damned.

Before developer studios killed their community forums and moved communication to Twitter, and while we were all playing Mafia Wars and The Sims Social on Facebook, awkwardly flirting with sims created by our close friends. An age where the latest Sims game didn't have swimming pools, and most of us were still venturing out Into the Future.

That time was 2014. A time before gaming was corrupted by an onslaught of nonstop subscription models and battle passes. When 30 hours to beat a game was perfectly acceptable. When loading into something brand new, felt ... exciting.
But war, war has changed.

Warframe was released in 2013, and then later, for the Playstation 4, in 2014. This was mostly only an alpha, and all you could really do was jump down to a handful of extermination missions from a static solar system map.

Around the same timeframe, the first Destiny was released on consoles, and, at the time, didn't even remotely touch a PC.

Both games shared (and still share) similarities. As Warframe evolved, it became a mission-hub, shooter-looter game where you built your character, played with friends, and spent the rest of your time sifting through playing-card-eque warframe modifications. Destiny, and then its sequel, years later, are really not all that different.

It's a theme I don't feel has really caught on all that much outside of ... well, Warframe and Destiny. Sure, we have Helldivers 2, but, that's kinda sorta similar, but also not really.

Warframe and Destiny 2 exist as "live service" games. Games that exist without a subscription, but do have expansions and microtransactions, and are persistent, never-ending. I think back in the golden age of gaming, we would call this a hybrid MMO.

They don't really exist in a niche, but this genre has largely been overshadowed by MOBAs, and then survival games, and then battle royales. I think the battle royale genre still reigns supreme as one of the most popular format of games to play. Although, personally, it's starting to feel pretty stale for me. Even if Apex Legends is really cool.

But, now we're in 2024. Warframe has been out for about 11 years, and Destiny has been chugging along for around the same amount of time. And I guess Nexon decided to throw their own hat into the ring. For ... reasons?

Enter: The First Descendant. Like if Mass Effect Andromeda had a child with Destiny, and then got cybernetically modified with implants from Warframe. It's a game occupying a concept that already exists, so much so, they purposely or accidentally copied UI design directly from Destiny 2. And, as damning as this may look, I decided to give the game a shot, regardless.

Hello, I am now a bunny.

The game starts out kind of unremarkable, dropping you into a sci-fi universe where an evil big guy wants an artifact for his own evil doing and bidding, and you've got to stop him.

The First Descendant is a third-person looter shooter powered by Unreal Engine 5. Become a Descendant. Fight for the survival of humanity. Descendants have unique abilities to tackle both solo and co-op missions. Up to 4 players use varied mechanics to defeat giant bosses. BE THE FIRST DESCENDANT!

It ... kind of reminds me of the beginning of Destiny 2, paraphrased and rewritten.
You're a descendant, and you can do really cool stuff with your hands, like shoot out ice, or electricity, and also fire guns at monsters.

My first impression, is that the gun play kind of sucks. It feels like holding a stick and going "pew pew pew" with imaginary bullets. Sure, they're actually coming out of the gun, but there's next to no feedback when you're firing a gun, and when your shots are hitting your target. It just doesn't feel like I'm shooting a weapon that kills things.

Now, the graphics are pretty slick, and, well, I don't know if this is an issue with Linux, or what, but I'm running pretty good hardware, okay? And having the settings on high, I get great FPS ... until I venture into an area where there's a lot going on, or onto a battlefield where missions are happening. Everything slows down to a 15 FPS slug-fest. And, apparently, this is something that's happening to a lot of people, and it may not actually be a hardware issue.

It's been quite a while since I've felt the struggle of a poorly optimized game.
Within the first ten levels, I wasn't really feeling like I was having all that much fun. I was feeling like I was just shooting a gun at some aliens until loot popped out, and repeating the process over and over until I was really powerful, and also had access to the Bunny descendant.

This is about where things start to get better. I like the bunny lady.

With my descendant now fully maxed out with all the gear you can wear, and equipped with modifications (that has an interface eerily similar to Warframe), I'm starting to feel like progress is happening.

I notice something though ... this game takes place, entirely, on just one planet? Did I miss something? What happens when you've completed all the missions across the map? Is it endgame time? Do I get to go to space and see other planets?
I mean, this is what I'm expecting, since this is a direct copy and paste of Destiny and Warframe. But I've done almost no reading on the extended story of this game, and am speaking about it now from only first-hand experience.

But what about the voice acting?

The voice-overs in TFD sound like a typical dub in an anime. Some of them are alright, some of them sound like the person speaking has no emotional capacity whatsoever. It's a very, Nexon-ish, Eastern grinder game. Which is fine! Grinding mobs for loot is something I've done since 2001, when I joined Anarchy Online.

More issues, and stuff, and things.

From the jump, to level 14, I'm only really now starting to feel like I could enjoy TFD, and that's if they continue to fix it, and put out new content, and aren't sued by two different developer studios.

One of the issues I encountered while randomly playing the game, thus far, is that pretty much all the content is designed with having other people around you, in mind. Except, even though there are a lot of people playing this game, sometimes there is nobody doing the mission you need help with. So, you kind of just fail, and then fail again, and then either stand there and wait for someone to waltz in, or go do another mission and return later.

I've said it before years and years ago, and over and over again since then: A persistent online game where there is only group content, is a game I'm not that interested in.

Eve Online is great, until you find out you can't do anything actually fun or remarkable unless you become a social butterfly and join massive corporations, and constantly collaborate with other people. I'm a recluse! I don't want to do that all the time!

Albion Online is awesome ... until you hit a wall and find out you're gonna die, son. You're gonna die and enjoy it, unless you join a guild with active players, and collab--You already know what the heck's going on.

Black Desert Online is exactly the same, but it has more solo content than the previously mentioned games.

What I'm trying to get at here is, even if your game is online only, built around co-op and being massively multiplayer, you still need to have content people can do by themselves, or you're going to annoy me. You're going to bring a screeching halt to your entire game if for some reason a ton of people just stop playing.

I will give TFD a little merit, though. One of the reasons I don't really play Warframe, is that their story and quests are ridiculously convoluted, and not very friendly to people who have day jobs. You're telling me I have to grind for a week if I want a cool gun? Are you fuggin' serious, dude?

The same kind of goes for Destiny. I like the theme, but I don't like how a lot of the game kind of feels like a slog, until you get to the content you want to be in.
TFD, so far, you pretty much just blast through everything like a stream of water through toilet paper.

This could be good, or bad, depending on what exactly the endgame is.

At the end of it all.

With my initial impressions down, and my extensive history of having seen this all before, and knowing exactly who Nexon is, as a company, and what they're probably going to do (Hello, exorbitant cash shop prices), would I continue playing?

Probably. I kind of do want to see what the endgame is like, and just how deep customization and stat-building goes.

Would I recommend it to other people?

Uh ... maybe? If you feel the same way I do about Warframe and Destiny? Give it a shot, maybe we'll talk, and I'll help you shoot some mindless aliens.

So, let's jump right the heck in ...

Nostr, the misconceptions, and the truth

I recently wrote about Nostr, and its relayed protocol of user-owned identity that you can take ... wherever. I outlined a lot of thoughts and impressions I initially had, and then what I wrote went to Reddit, and then it found itself on Nostr. It got there entirely outside my own involvement. I posted to Mastodon, and almost nowhere else.

This inspired me to log back in, and set some things up (such as domain verification from one of a few domains I own), and then I explored a bit. I interacted with people, participated in some community events that came up spontaneously, and really dug into the extreme multitude of features that run across the Nostr network.

Let's just say, I was pretty floored, and some of the impressions I had were wrong. Such as thinking that a place that is more centered around the idea of lacking censorship, or robust moderation, must be filled with toxic, horrible trolls. In the couple of days I've been messing with the network, I think I've muted like one person who said some off-the-wall shit in my notifications.

But ... I think Nostr has nasty people just in the same way Twitter, Threads, and Mastodon do. They exist, and they always will, no matter where you go.
Suffice to say, I learned a lot about what decentralization was, and now is. I was given an article by user 7fqx that gave some really in-depth information about the emergence of decentralization--Scuttlebutt, ActivityPub, and then ATProtocol, and Nostr.

I'm not going to lie, I originally started writing this as a hit piece against Bluesky, thinking their ATProtocol was just a riff of what Nostr was doing. But, apparently, both ATP and Nostr were developed independent of each other, and mostly without any knowledge of one or the other. I think that's ... actually pretty wild, and strange.

On the topic of decentralization, which is something I feel is integral to the future of the internet, I now understand Mastodon to be a place of islands, and decentralization that occurs in a way that's more like isolated communities talking to other isolated communities. Like the latter half of The Walking Dead.

In a way, it's decentralization, the half-measure. The full-measure, that comes with some iffy trade-offs some may not like, is Nostr, and ATProtocol.

You take your identity, your thoughts, your posts, and you move freely between pieces of software, and networks, and you lose nothing (this is nearly the direct opposite of Mastodon, where moving to a new server means burning everything you've ever posted, to the ground). And, honestly, I'm kind of starting to feel like that's how it should be. The downside, is that, on Nostr, you have a public key, and a secret key. Your secret key is something you use to log in and sign events coming from your account, and your public key is basically your identity. That's not the iffy part, though. The iffy part, is that people can use your public key to see all of your data except direct messages (which are encrypted).

Not entirely too scary, unless you're doing a lot of weird things on your account. But definitely something you should know if you decide that this is a journey you want to take, and you're not jaded from hearing about how much Jack Dorsey loved Nostr and it's Bitcoin affiliation (a lot of people across different platforms hold a lot of dislike for the man).

At this point, I'm less worried about the power consumption of BTC transactions, and have more shifted that focus to content farms from the likes of Microsoft and Nvidia buying up all the AI tech they can get their grubby little hands on.

That aside, I'm not writing this to blow smoke up the Bluesky developer's butts. I, in fact, am not favorable of Bluesky and there are some specific reasons for that. Maybe this spells their downfall, or maybe they'll be a tight-knit community that doesn't really expand all that much, forever.

Bluesky, the Apple of social media

Bluesky is a place that a couple million people call home (I think, last I saw, it was around 6 million or so). There's no algorithm, and much like Nostr, you own your identity. Except, for now, that's mostly tied to the website's central server.

Now, obviously, there are far less people populating Nostr, but Nostr and its relays are able, and are connected to both ActivityPub and Bluesky (just, not through ATProtocol).

Most of what you'll see on bsky.app are quite a few furries, an actually impressive population of Second Life users, and quite a lot of LGBTQ+ people. None of these things or communities are inherently bad. In fact, I think they're probably the only reason Bluesky is really alive at all, today.

My angst and negative feelings about the direction of Bluesky have nothing to do with the LGBTQ+ community, or any other community residing on the platform.
The issues I mainly hold have to do with how far up their own asses the board and developers are, in regard to the platform, and its development over the past year or so. This is why I kind of think of them as the Apple of social media. And you might think, "Hey, don't you own like a billion pieces of Apple tech?"

Yeah, I do.

But this is more like if Apple skipped over having Steve Jobs and just went straight to some random guy who didn't know what he was doing. You know, like putting up a wall and locking out all potential users for a year, and keeping all new sign-ups under lock and key via exclusive codes. As you might imagine, having that walled-garden erected through six or seven different events where people were leaving Twitter in droves, very likely probably worked against the social network's best interest.

Mainly, because Threads came out of absolutely nowhere, and sucked up most of those users.

That's only half of the issue, though. The other part to all of this, is that the developers I see directly on Bluesky do not recognize or acknowledge this at all. Paul Frazee, whose influence goes back quite a bit further than Bluesky, posts as though it's the greatest platform ever made (maybe just because he's a developer for Bluesky). But the website, despite its six million some-odd users, feels almost completely dead.

Which is ridiculous, because, as I've said, Nostr has far less users than that, and it most definitely doesn't feel dead when you post.

Not to mention, we're over a year into Bluesky, and it still, more or less, is propped up to look, feel, and act just like Twitter did in 2014. ATProtocol, in this respect, still feels mostly like an afterthought that's inaccessible to most users.

Meanwhile, if you really like Nostr, you can get going with your own chunk of the network immediately, with about a page of install commands.

It's this mixture of grandiosity that emanates from Bluesky, and the blunder of keeping their doors closed through one exodus after another, that I think they've shot themselves in the feet so much that they now don't have feet. They have stumps.

But, if you've followed me all the way through this article, I think there's a way they can blow the doors open. But, then they'd have to sort of abandon their idea of the ATProtocol, and stop trying to be the center of social media they most definitely are not, and probably never will be. And, really, that's the final issue I have with Bluesky and the ATProtocol.

It feels like they're trying to do Nostr, but be corporate-owned. Bluesky doesn't feel like it's owned by the people, developed by the people, and run by the people. It feels like it's run by some suits, who give the impression that the people will have their freedom, as long as they say it's okay.

And that, my buddy ol' pal, just ain't okay.

The elephant and the ostrich

Which brings us squarely back to Mastodon, and Nostr. Both platforms have their own merits. Nostr is about controlling your own content, and what you see, and largely eschews censorship to a high degree. But everyone can see almost everything you do and are talking about, whenever they want. Mastodon, on the other hand, puts the tools into a user's hands to create a network, and build their own communities, while picking and choosing who those communities interact with. A network that ... encourages users to police everyone around them ... which is how we end up with tyrannical admins acting like they work in a prison, and they've just been promoted to Warden.

If only there were some way to take the best parts of both of these animals, and make them one.

An elephrich.

For now, though, I am at least pretty content to screw around with both while I feel around and see what sticks. In the age of corporate control and censorship so heavy that people can't even say "kill" or "suicide" any more (these are only two of the most egregious examples I can think of), I think it's healthy to explore your options, and cement your identity, and who you are online, before everything else we've come to know is lost completely.

If that's something you care about, at least.