In search of a self-sovereign indieweb

I’ve been building this little log section of my website over the last few days because I wanted a place to post links, short notes, quotidian pictures, and the like—but I want it to be a place that I own. The ethos of the IndieWeb and Micro.blog are very attractive to me, and I’m increasingly allergic to the algorithmic grinder of Twitter, Instagram, and similar platforms. As a result, I’ve gone down a deep rabbit hole researching possible designs.

I thought about using Micro.blog itself, but I don’t see how I actually own anything if I’m hosted there. I’d be subject to their community guidelines, which literally have a pride flag emoji in them. A straightforward reading of the guidelines leads me to conclude that if I were to assert that there are only two sexes, I’d be liable to get booted from the service. And that’s just an obvious example—there are any number of common-sense statements I could make that would violate progressive sensibilities and thus the guidelines. Not that I want to spend my days offending progressives, but like many other Americans, I’m pretty much done with having a self-censor on my shoulder second-guessing my every utterance.

It turns out that the same is true of most other “decentralized” and federated social networks, like Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, etc. You ultimately have to run your own server or be at the mercy of the guidelines of the server you join, and as far as I’ve seen, they’re largely woke—or at the very least, could become so at any moment. One might be able to join a “free-speech” server, although I haven’t found one, and if I did, I’m almost certain what you would find there is a ghetto of unpleasant people. No doubt such a server would be blocked by every other part of the federation. I’m pretty sure that happened to Gab.

This all led me to Nostr, which I’d long heard about from Bitcoin circles but had never checked out. Well, it turns out that, of course, it’s exactly what I’d want in an open publishing network. There’s no joining any servers, much less having to run your own; all you have to do to use it is generate a public-key pair. If you don’t want to see someone’s posts, just don’t follow them—or even block them—but if someone wants to see your posts, there’s not much anyone can do to prevent that. I won’t go into the details of the design here because you can read about it elsewhere, but I’ll just say that it’s ingenious, especially because it does not make the mistake of presupposing that decentralization requires P2P, consensus, or anything like that.

So, I’m going to be exploring Nostr more and considering how I might integrate it here. That said, I think one problem Nostr has is its implicit connection to Bitcoin—and I say that as a Bitcoiner. First, the perception from outsiders is that Nostr is just a place for Bitcoiners to talk about Bitcoin and not much else. In the little time I’ve spent there, I can say that’s not true. On Nostr, people not only talk about Bitcoin, but they also talk about Nostr. If it is to grow into a viable decentralized alternative with mass appeal, it’s going to have to be home to conversations on a broader range of topics. Secondly, if it were to really grow, relayers will have to be incentivized to run their servers, which means paying them. Today, this is possible with Lightning network payments, but I think that’s not really an option for mass participation. In my view, Nostr is a more viable mass social network than Bitcoin is a mass form of money. (Ducks.)

Anyhow, I’ll update here on what I end up doing, which at the moment I think will be publishing first here and then POSSE syndicating to lots of other networks for reach and interaction—with probably an emphasis on Nostr. Stay tuned.