Hopefully nostr will get more of attention too.

For some reason even as someone hungry for some distributed socializing, I haven't been compelled to try nostr at all. Who hangs out there?

Well... people?

Quite a few of them crypto enthusiasts and sometimes timeline can look like you've come across some crypto scam page, lol. This scares some people.

What I like about Nostr is its simplicity comparedy to ActivityPub.

The protocol is basically a set of NIPs[1] (Nostr Implementation Possibilities). Each of them describes what features relays and clients may or have to implement.

Out of 99 (currently) NIPs only one (NIP 01) is mandatory and around twelwe are stable\final (the other ones are drafs for now). So to create a basic nosrt relay or clien you have to implement a bare minimum of functionality.

The way it works:

Each user has a public and a private key.

Public one is to be shared with other people and can be published online.

The Private one is your identity you use to "log in" via nostr client of you choice.

As soon as you log in with your private key a client will fetch your notes (and notes of other people you follow if any) from relay(s), assuming you were communicating with these relays before (which will be the case unless you are using more than one client with completely different sets of relays they are talking to).

In Nostr a client (a web app, mobile app, cli tool etc) simple publishes notes to N relays and gets\receives notes from them.

Quite similar to RSS, except you have more than one RSS agregator and feed is being actively pushed to the said agredgator by "publisher".

Also if you are using a client that implemented NIP-72 (like https://satellite.earth/) you basically get a simple reddit alternative

[1]: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips