this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2025
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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What are the advantages over Mastodon? Is it compatible with ActivityPub?
No, it is not. Mastodon is federated, this means your account is owned by the instance owner and can be banned. Bastyon is decentralized meaning there is no owner, your content can be blocked if there is a report and a random jury of high reputation users unanimously agrees that rules have been violated.
Reading more about it, I see it's based on a blockchain, with Pocketcoin token serving as a currency to incentivise node operators.
So, do I understand it right that every action and piece of media is distributed around all nodes, which are incentivised by crypto to keep going? And that user doesn't normally operate a node per se, but has an account, similar to a crypto wallet, on this blockchain? Also, do node maintainer rewards come from users or the emission pool?
For now it looks to me like a terribly scalable and wasteful system with potential for monetary enshittification. Also, financing is unclear: if it's on users, barely anyone is gonna pay for everything they publish. If it comes from the pool, even if it is diminishing like with Bitcoin, what would generate demand for the token? Governance?
But I might not see everything
Good job looking into it a bit instead of freaking out like most others on here. It is running and working and has been for over 6 years if I am not mistaken, it was named pocketnet previously.
Users do not have to pay to publish. Advertisers can pay to boost content and get visibility. There are many people dedicated to free speech and anti-censorship so they will continue to run nodes even if they are not turning a profit. At this point nodes stake coins and earn rewards, not sure of the long term tokenomics, have not gone super deep on it.
Fedi is mostly hostile to the idea of crypto, which is why such projects are commonly a no-go for this audience.
6 years is a fairly long run, so I hope tokenomics was somehow figured out.
Advertising is something commonly rejected; I too see this as a strong negative. Paid boosting of genuine content is not great, but I'll take it.
Question: what advantages does it have over hosting your own fedi server? Anonymity? Not having to invest in hosting to get more control? Not having to build federated connections and rediscover communities?
Specifically in the context of this post you cannot be forced to collect any data on users or be prosecuted for not collecting because you are not hosting accounts, they are on-schain. Fedi is a very different type of platform and not really a direct alternative. Bastyon is trying to compete with twitter mainly IMO.
You do not get any special access or control by hosting a server because it is just a node that relays data. This makes the network more robust and faster as a user's app will connect to the fastest nodes for a better experience.
Here is an in-depth article about the platform
https://www.publish0x.com/at-scottcbusiness/the-guide-to-bastyon-and-pkoin-xznxqdk
How does Bastyon work? - https://bastyon.com/help?page=faq
I see, thanks!
Someone owns that website
The website is just a fronted, it is not running the platform. If the website is shut down you can still access the platform via the open source app, it cannot be stopped.