Trip Report: exploring alternate socials (SSB, Nostr, Farcaster, the Forkiverse)

One Month(ish) ago:

https://bsky.app/profile/jakesimonds.com/post/3m6cyvh4yb22f

(screenshot because I'm planning to set up auto-delete on old posts soon)

SSB (secure scuttlebutt)

I am @t/T99c0Pi9ygPvYzfPfMRD6Kl3v1l6I9yDa5gjJeQ20=.ed25519

Surprise:

I was surprised in 2026 that there's activity on SSB at all! I'd only ever heard of people talk about it in the past tense. But there are people posting to it! I found interesting ... I'd call them digital artists. I found interesting people actively doing interesting things and using SSB to showcase cool stuff/software they'd made.

Delight:

The social graph actually felt like it mattered in browsing SSB. Like, my initial experience I had to find a person thru a pump or relay or whatever, and then from them I could find more people. It felt organic and fresh and made me wish that I was in person with friends and SSB could be kinda cool if you started from being literally in the same place, computers either talking directly or on same relay/pump thing.

Hit a wall:

I promise I really tried. But despite my best efforts I was not able to find that elusive first follower.

I yes I think I followed at least one pub? If you're on SSB plz follow me and explain it to me.

But yeah it was a bit of work to just even find a human on SSB. Download the client. Make an account. Find a pub. Error message. Find an active pub. Browse the pub. Find I'm not allowed to see the people on the pub, so I just see like ghost aliases? Finally find someone who's default public or idk what. And then follow them, and thru them follow other public people and hope maybe one of them follows me back? If they even saw my follow which maybe they didn't because decentralization?

Nostr

I am jakesimonds.com (if I did the aliasing right) but my friends call me npub1nxkvypw5ntjr5pp3q6rcnt4wrgtu5az4npmg06pq9lkntfesy3gsruqnj5

Surprise:

Lots of christians. Lots of bitcoin. Lots of people who clearly (in a good way) have made nostr a part of their life. And so you see the photo of the beach where they just went for a run and it feels...broken-in like a shoe or a glove (as opposed to other networks I visited where it felt like people were still figuring out what the thing was for).

Delight:

Lots of nerdy technical things that delighted me. I can use jakesimonds.com as my handle! The Nips were fun to scan thru. I also then read Building Nostr , which would have been a better place to start. deVine looks awesome! I learned a lot poking at things like chesstr , and I do think nostr ... like I think started to get why some people are so into it. It really does feel like a swiss army knife of a protocol that you could do kinda anything with.

(btw I didn't mean to do this but in linking to chesstr I created a new game. Feel free to make a move! The url is a unique game and the state is...managed with nostr events...somehow...it's cool...I spent some time with it and I felt like I learned something though I don't remember the details now).

Hit a wall:

I didn't go looking for spicy/conspiratorial/highly objectionable content. I sure found it though. Tinfoil-hat-level conspiratorial talk was unavoidable. And some really ugly stuff too that ... Nostr being a swiss-army knife I bet you could craft a better experience but though I didn't do an exhaustive search I didn't see anybody building intentionally moderated spaces (Does that exist? Please point me there!).

Also onboarding was rough and I don't think can really get better because the roughness was a product of the decentralization.

I think about onboarding in terms of: what admin do you make me do before something positive can happen? And for nostr, just to even see a dang post I had to

1: find and pick a client (very confusing landscape, no clear authorities to listen to (which is a feature of decentralization, not a bug I think?))

2: find and pick a wallet

3: figure out that I need a key pair

4: find and pick a service to make my keypair or decide to do it raw myself (I did it myself).

I used nos2x as a wallet. They keypair I think I raw just...with claude I don't even remember how but I remember thinking many times "this can't be right" even though it was totally fine.

I also now ... somewhere ... have my private nostr key in a txt file. Which I now need to guard with my life for the rest of my life.

The clients ... I tried Primal and then Coracle and then Iris. I did manage to find some starter lists, so I was able to start seeing real activity pretty quick but I wasn't able to really ... granularly discover things I was interested in. My feed remained full of bitcoin and christianity (not knocking either! Just both things that I got a lot of that I hadn't sought out specifically).

Farcaster

I am: jakesimonds.eth https://farcaster.xyz/jakesimonds.eth

Surprise:

There is an near-ATProtean level of earnestness on farcaster where people really don't want farcaster to turn into a casino.

(I'm now very much in the hazard-zone of writing about social networks where I don't know enough to really be qualified to say anything, btw)

They joke about how on farcaster you only ever talk about farcaster itself or ethereum. They encourage each other to take digital detoxes and post wholesome pictures of bread and stuff. They talk shit about twitter. They have informed opinions on the benefits and inherent issues with microblogging.

My hot take: Farcaster is Bluesky's Wario.

Because for all its similarities, it's also insanely different. One time I saw a guy on farcaster who's take was (I'm paraphrasing) I can't wait to see retired professional athletes return to their sports because of the coming advances in bio-science! It's gonna be nuts!! In ATProto that person would be ignored or roasted but on farcaster ... again maybe I just am not looking in the right places but I don't see much roasting. I see vigorous debate. But not much roasting.

Delight:

(disclosure: I had the perfect farcaster onboarding in that on a whim I went to an ethereum convention, and so I met some really cool people building cool stuff on farcaster and that's colored my experience greatly)

onboarding was super smooth, including the app setting up an ethereum wallet for me

I have about as many followers on farcaster as I do on bluesky despite being an order of magnitude less active there. Are a lot of them bots? Sure. Does it still feel good to check farcaster and see a number go up? Yup!

I was at a dinner and people casually made a coin:

IIRC everybody bought $5-10 (including me...I didn't have anything set up so somebody just very quickly and I was impressed in the smoothness of it sent me five bucks to buy in via the app) and then we casually watched it. It was fun.

real money moving around changes the vibe for sure. I'm not following it all closely enough to have an informed opinion on Is Farcaster a casino/becoming a casino? I can say my experience on farcaster, probably significantly improved by being bootstrapped by meeting people IRL first, doesn't feel like a casino. It feels like Wario bluesky. (for the record...when I think about $$ and social media and crypto ... one thing I think is that if tomorrow I could pay money to have a better social media experience and trade money for improved quality and less quantity of time on social media I'd do it in a heartbeat. Another thing I think is that money is just another lever for the addictive nature of social media. Like I already care too much about likes and follows. And I can easily see how it could also turn into caring about small or large sums of money in a pretty gross way).

Hit a wall:

I like farcaster. I like ethereum people. I have hit a bit of a wall just ... like all or most social networks it's its own thing and its own conversation with its own language and I can't always follow. So it's become a thing I check occasionally and there's some people I really like who are active there and that's about it.

Forkiverse

I am @jakesimonds@theforkiverse.com (but @jakesimonds.com@bsky.brid.gy https://mastodon.social/@jakesimonds.com@bsky.brid.gy is better (better as in I'm more active))

(this is from Search Engine / Hard Fork the podcasts. They made a mastodon instance?)

Surprise:

Surprised that this exists! Surprised that busy journalists want to also be social media admins (though I think a credit to Activity Pub world is it seems like their DevOps stuff is well done (ie, they do a good job to help you found a server)).

It only launched Friday but surprised at how ... familiar it has felt?

Delight:

The photos people have shared (we were told to share an ideally low-res photo) has been delightful. I've seen Mt Tabor where I used to walk a lot in Portland, OR. People's desk set ups. A lot of europe. Good stuff.

People have been nice! It's also been delightful...there's been a delightful tension of ... what is this thing and what's gonna happen here?

It's also been nice to do the cold start with other people. We're all in this together in the Forkiverse!

Hit a wall:

I don't know the ActivityPub world. Like everything with social media I made the irreversible decision to invest my time into learning ATProto not ActivityPUb, and so now it's more convenient for me when things are built in that world.

Reflections/How did it go?

Digital Rick Steves hit some walls/had some visa issues.

1: The details matter for a lot, and get technical fast. And people care a lot, especially about social networks where part of it is your community/identity. So that's hard. Plus...

2: there's so many networks! If I'm gonna write about a great number of them, I necessarily will be shallow in my knowledge of each specific one. Also...

3: onboard-maxxing sucks! So many passwords. So many clients where the client is named something different than the network and I gotta remember both. So many lonely cold starts.

All that said, I think ... it's kinda cool that in 2026 with so much of the digital world so profoundly broken that there's tons of people trying tons of different things.

SSB is a cool historical curiosity that also isn't dead yet and will never die even if the docs are confusing and a Professional Software Engineer can't figure out how to get a single follower despite trying kinda hard. The original MVP.

Nostr is beautifully simple and gave me an appreciation of the problem space.

Farcaster...never change, farcaster. I'll still visit you even if you become a casino.

The Forkiverse makes me think about a bluesky post I saw from someone affiliated with The Verge about (paraphrasing) how if they were starting The Verge today they might look closely at ATProto. We have really cool primitives in all these decentralized socials. Really cool things can be built in 2026 that would have been impossible not that long ago. It's interesting to think about the media part of social media and how maybe that could be a first class citizen? Idk.

And please take all of the above with a massive grain of salt! What do I know? (Though I am interested in impressions from people who know more about these networks than I do)