I recently made a post about Shinigami Eyes and BlockParty and started thinking about activist tools.
The ones mentioned are of course merely mitigation tools, but speaking of activist tools more broadly, like some people suggest Signal and Tor Browser for activists, as a fine balance between security and a low technical bar for entrance.
I am not really sure that any of these differ substantially from Matrix and Firefox and why they are so special.
The ActivityPub protocol. the one Lemmy uses, is a mature protocol and people have put thought in various aspects of it.
Apart from Lemmy, there are ActivityPub applications that foster activist and IRL communication, like Framasoft’s Mobilizon.
The main issue I would think of about ActivityPub instances for community organizing is the lack of specialized features for this type of work, like polling.
And the major issue of course is the pseudonymity/anonymity and completely open signups renders existing apps like Lemmy untenable for community activism organizing.
In your opinion, what would it take for an Activity Pub application to be a secure, efficient tool for community activism?
Perhaps I’m the one who’s mistaken.
I came to this conclusion because: From my initial cursory investigation of NOSTR, in all of the instructions to get started I found, the first step was to create a lightning wallet. Maybe I’m incorrect but, from what I understood, BTC’s authentication is one and the same with NOSTR’s authentication.
If that is the case, then it arguably be an extra step for new people to join. I fear that not many will unless already familiar with Bitcoin etc.
I’m a fan of crypto but I happen to hold the strong opinion that BTC’s authentication algorithm shouldn’t have been chosen because it’s not secure enough for future proofing. Furthermore, that BTC tie-in will alienate many people including myself. Anyway, I’d love some help forking NOSTR to NOT use BTC authentication because that task is FAR beyond my skills.
About the technical side of my response. I have difficulty understanding your concern, because from what I have seen so far, NOSTR is a protocol and has different implementations. As a protocol it is very liberal since it mostly goes on to specify the structure of the “event” data type. In the specification I saw that it specifies signing and verifying notes with private/public key pairs, but I haven’t seen yet where on the protocol level it requires Bitcoin Lightning. Is it possible that you have looked into a specific implementation which elected to use such cryptographic keys as to make it interoperate with the Bitcoin blockchain to start with? In that case, the articles linked by the project mention that the protocol is simple and can be implemented “in a weekend”. That means that instead of even forking it at all you can roll your own in your chosen framework?