Protocols on An Untitled Blog

A Technical Comparison of Distributed Social Media Protocols v3

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Update 3/14/2026: I’ve updated the post to reflect that porting Nomadic Identities to Activity Pub is still ongoing. Shoutout to silverpill@mitra.social. Also, less than 24 hours posting this, BlueSky CEO Jay Grabber has stepped down from her roll. A change in leadership may change the state of the platform, which may cause this post to be somewhat inaccurate in the future.

Hello, I’m back for round three of my social media protocol comparisons. I wrote v2 because of some mistakes on my part, although it’s been two years since writing it, and it’s become a bit out of date. It’s also a bit long, with a bunch of explainers and clutter right at the start of it, so for this round, I figured I’d get things up to date while shortening the text (or at least moving ramblings to footnotes) and move a lot of the explainers to the end.

This is Fine: an Interim Microblogging Protocols Update

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As is customary on my microblogging posts, let’s get us started with an original meme.

Also, if you’d like to read my previous Microblogging Protocols compared posts, you can read v1 here and v2 here.

It’s been a little over a year since I made my updated microblogging protocols comparison. Since then a few things have happened, and my previous could use some trimming. In the spirit of keeping things shorter (and keeping the comparison v3 post relevant longer), I figured I’d split the post into two parts: this one, which includes random updates and things that happened over the last year or so - and a second one, “Microblogging Protocols Compared v3” which will be a more streamlined protocol comparison. Anyway, as you can probably tell by the meme, the microblogging protocols have been going through a rough patch lately - though it’s not all bad news.

NFTs and Dark Web Shenanagins

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A based design that makes a web that’s true
ICANNs and NATs embrace shall be no more
Behind a Pi or in the cloud for you
We use that tool be I2P or Tor

Come join a world of speech that can flow free
The words by truths of math they shall be bound
A power built right in that’s DHT
Identity by key pairs holds its ground

IPFS a poggers web design
ID by content not by where it is
Defi domain to own your name online
A world that’s free of gov and free of biz

Microblogging Protocols Compared v2

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Update: September 20th, 2024: I was incorrect regarding AT’s (BlueSky) inability to fully delete things, the protocol DOES support fully deleting posts from the user’s repo and I’ve updated the post to reflect that. Read more. Big thanks to Ryan for providing the info.

Also, on a less important update (in regards to this post’s accuracy) - in keeping tradition with the original post - Bluesky has managed to change rapidly shortly after I finished this. It’s good news again, in this case a huge influx of users, many from Brazil after Twitter/X was blocked. Additionally, I also recently saw Frontpage, an AT based link aggregator. In the post I mention a few times hoping more will be built on AT now that it’s opened up, and it appears exactly that is happening.

I made a client, Nostr surpassed Mastodon, and BlueSky is open?

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

So after two very long posts, one complaining about web browsers and one comparing the three big non-centralized social media protocols, I thought about writing two shorter posts about random things (hats and making sour krout specifically). However, between then and now stuffs happened and I thought I would make an anthology post with three different mini topics I wanted to share.

I made a client

So yeah, I made a client that can post to Nostr, Activity Pub, and BlueSky (hopefully all of AT once it’s fully opened). It’s a bit hacky, and written in Python using dependencies that do all the heavy lifting, but it works. It can broadcast the same post to all three, post different posts to different protocols, or skip posting to a protocol altogether. There’s a version that uses Keyring to have your OS manage your credentials instead of baking them into a script, and it’ll run on just about everything. I’m not a programmer by trade, and it’s been a very long time since I wrote any code for public consumption, so I’m excited to get it working and share it. Apparently I’m the second person to do this, as shortly under two weeks before I released mine somebody else made Nootti, so if you like this idea, are on IOS, and want something more polished that is also an option as well.

ActivityPub/Nostr/AT-BlueSky Compared

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Note: This post is out of date, here’s a more up to date version

Update August 5th 2024

I have some good and bad news regarding this post. First, I made two mistakes. AT crawlers are not in fact crawlers, they are called relays. Also, shared inboxes are actually part of the Activity Pub W3C standard as apposed to hacky additions to the protocol by third party servers. I was wrong about Activity Pub servers sending multiple messages to the same server remote to update it about a single post.

Platform Agnostic Following

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Chances are if you’re here it’s through an RSS feed (or an RSS feed bridged to something else), so I probably don’t need to do too much of an introduction. Here’s a quick rundown if you’re unfamiliar. However, today I wanted to talk about RSS (as well as three other means of following content), how I’ve benefited from it, and a small project I started. Just about every piece of content I follow is through RSS - organized into different categories (news, blogs, videos, audio, etc), and the following benefits really stand out:

Nostr

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I have recently been re-dipping my toes into Nostr (tried it a while back just to experiment with it but never really stuck around), and so far it’s become my preferred microblogging platform. There’s a handful of reasons surrounding that, both in the protocol itself and what’s being built up around it, and I think it has a lot of promise that merits its very quick growth. Today I thought I would go over why I am a fan of it, and why I think it might be worth checking out if you’re interested in a more decentralized web.

MITM Risks in Signal? Mitigation + Monologue

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Update 11/25: I was made aware that Signal has some proprietary anti-spam code and added the TLDR.

A More Technical TLDR

I never know how much jargon I should include or how much I should explain, and as long as I’m writing I’m enjoying myself meaning I’ve been all over the place. But here’s a shortened version for those familiar with encryption.

A vanilla implementation of the Signal protocol relies on public key infrastructure to perform a handshake between devices. As you may know, a public key server can certify that any device/key belongs to an account if you have nothing more to go on than a phone number. Furthermore, at any point the server may say keys have changed and direct you to start communicating with a device other than the one you expect.

What is IPFS + basic use

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

IPFS, an acronym for “InterPlanetary File System”, is a way to deliver files that takes a different approach to HTTP. As I mentioned in my very first post, I originally considered hosting my entire site/blog on it, and while I decided against it for reasons I mentioned there and reasons I’ll get into later here; I am working on something that may involve me sharing files here, which I’ll probably use IPFS for. This is of course in addition to me finding it an interesting method of sharing data and worth speaking about.