I posted this on Nostr earlier, adding to the conversation about how to attract users from X and FaceBook.

My point was that people who have grown up on centralised Twitter, Youtube, FaceBook, Instagram platforms, need to understand what “a decentralised platform” means. And then you won’t get flummoxed by hype over substance.

For the longest time, Bitcoin, the first and purest form of decentralised money, was lumped in with 20,000 copy-cat tokens owned by VC’s, calling their money decentralised. Marketing over substance. Likewise, Nostr, currently the purest form of decentralised social media, is too easily lumped in with other platforms in the space, with fewer credentials to back up their claim of decentralised. 

And why does it matter if, say, a social media platform is less decentralised than the recognised industry benchmarks? Well, how frustrating to leave one sinking ship to sail to the same eventual doom on another that looked so promising at first glance. There is a good reason why almost every single copy-cat token is called a shit coin!

The decentralised social media scene

To get a clear picture of the decentralised social media scene, we need to look past the vibe of the user base (leftie, right-leaning, tech or vegan) and identify whether at its core a social media platform is decentralised in action as well as name.

I have looked at Bluesky and Mastodon, the more popular poster children for decentralised Twitter killers. They are slick, they do feel familiar and plenty of people use them. In that sense they are ahead of Nostr in its current state. But, the Bluesky and Mastodon projects strike me as “let’s get ahead as far we can before anyone realises this is just another centralised Twitter waiting to happen!“

The criticisms of Bluesky (and similar “decentralised” networks like Mastodon or AT Protocol setups) aren’t baseless or pure Nostr tribalism—they’re grounded in observable design choices and track records, though Nostr advocates can amp up the rhetoric to hype their own turf.

Bluesky – or Pie in the sky

Bluesky’s hybrid model is the big red flag: it runs on an open AT Protocol, sure, but with a centralised service (their “Bsky Social” app) that controls key feeds, moderation, and labelers.

Founders like Jay Graber have openly defended “composable” moderation tools and domain-based controls, which let them (or big-label partners) throttle or ban at scale when “needed.” That’s not paranoia—it’s happened, like with rapid policy shifts around post-2024 election controversies, where left-leaning leadership pivoted to heavier content policing.

Compare that to Nostr’s key-based, server-agnostic relay system: relays are scattered all over the world and have to follow rules (called NIPs) defined by the protocol itself—no single human choke point for zaps, notes, or events. Everyone playing by the same rules. You can even spin up your own relay if a popular one gets twitchy.

Mastodon – musta missed the point

Which leads on to Mastodon which has great concepts shouting freedom and censorship resistance, federating across instances. But in effect Mastodon is a network of of mini silos run by individuals, versus a single X silo.

Yes, the network is decentralised, but… it relies on instance admins who can react to ‘community needs’—fine if you trust one person’s judgment over your server, holding your content.

Individual instance admins are likely to cave to pressure to take down “uncomfortable content” if a government agency comes knocking. That completely removes content that may be perfectly acceptable to users and their governments in other jurisdictions. No native Nostr integration either—that’s a different protocol beast.

 Again, Nostr’s core architecture, a global army of relays obeying a unified protocol, avoids this potential human bottleneck. If a Nostr relay owner decides to delete your content, your content is still online via another relay. And if nobody wants to host your content, you can spin up your own relay and still be part of the Nostr ecosystem.

Farcaster – far from decentralised 

Warpcast is the main Farcaster app. Like Nostr, you take your ID and followers everywhere on the protocol, with healthy app development. It feels smoother than Nostr for crypto bros, but decentralized?

Nope – central control Warpcast bosses run the sequencer, acting like a post traffic cop. They can throttle feeds, filter, or straight-up ban users at key chokepoints.

Paywall ($5-15 to join + gas fees) should make a serious platform, but it’s a shill-fest playground for coin pumps and dump scams. Maybe that blockchain frame would work better for a different social vibe—paid models do tend to stay more civilized. But the core rot here is everything funneling through central bosses. So that’s not decentralised!

What’s the problem if a social media platform isn’t super decentralised?

All erode sovereignty over time – all roads lead back to human bottlenecks.

Nostr’s Bitcoin DNA (sign with keys, no accounts, censorship-resistant by default) makes it legitimately harder to capture, not just philosophically but technically. That gives it better long-term legs, a better investment of your time, energy and content.

Is there bias? Of course – Nostr is mostly founded on the same principles underpinning Bitcoin, so it has a top-down right-libertarian bent. It attracts folks burned by Big Tech moderators and people who seem to understand what hard money is, and value self-sovereignty over dependence on a centralised fiat economic standard. 

So a Nostr user may well frame Bluesky as “Twitter for lefties”. There is some truth in this, given its user skew and supported by the moderators’ approach to control, which is diametrically opposed to Nostr advocates’ philosophy of “let the free market decide” even if it hurts in the short term!

But the critique holds: if you’re fleeing X or Threads for true escape, Bluesky and Mastodon’s polish is a prettier cage. Nostr is rougher, right now, but it’s built to resist all the pitfalls still evident in BlueSky, Mastodon, Farcaster, and of course all legacy social media.

Pick your decentralised platform of choice based on who holds the keys, not the hype.

Reaching out from WordPress

Rather than preaching exclusively to the converted, I will be using this WordPress platform to reach out and explain:

Open Source Software that is decentralised ie Nostr, offers USERS way more advantages than say WordPress which is OSS, yay, but the hosting / platform ecosystem is significantly centralised.

And, oh boy, is it ever complicated hooking a WordPress site into all the standard social media platforms, embedding Youtube videos etc, each platform with their own passwords and Terms and Conditions. Check out Nostr to avoid that complexity and control.

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