Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet \ stacker news ~nostr

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Nostr gets a brief mention:

What is your relationship with Jack Dorsey like now?

Jack isn’t involved anymore. He had a portfolio approach to decentralized technologies, and early on he helped several projects get off the ground. He funded another distributed protocol that I think today he probably prefers, Nostr, which shares many architectural similarities to Bluesky, but it works more like a cryptocurrency wallet. You need keys. You have to be a bit more sophisticated as a user.

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50 sats \ 14 replies \ @kepford 21 May

What do you think the odds are for Bluesky to do it?

1122 sats \ 13 replies \ @k00b OP 21 May

Not great. They are marginally more open than X when it had an open API a decade ago and people were building custom clients. To scale, to justify the investment, it'll begin centralizing at the few margins where it currently isn't centralized, protecting their interests, so they can monetize.

Decentralization is primarily a marketing angle for them afaict; "no elon, no zuck here ... for now." Once they have a sufficient network effect, they'll transition their marketing to being about openness, then they won't bother with that either and attract people with the reach/scene.

In contrast to nostr, they are overpromising and doing great with the appearance of delivering. Nostr overpromises, and being more honest, underdelivers ... for now.

Toppling the existing social empires of network effects, and doing so in a way that's actually decentralized, will require a breakthrough we're yet to see imo.

I suspect nostr over time will turn into a de facto federation - every meaningful nostr app will have a Primal-like megarelay, holding a copy of most things on the network, and dealing with spam like SMTP does (this note is stored on this trusted relay, so I'll store it too). I know some people view that as fatal but I don't. The identity is portable so it'll likely produce unexpected novelty.

40 sats \ 10 replies \ @LibertasBR 21 May

If this type of filtering occurs, I understand that it is fine, you can use or not that client that filters the content of the relays. What I don't like are the federations, because it is a different way of centralizing something, even though this federation within Nostr is not an impediment to using other clients outside of this federation.

119 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 21 May

Yes, it's absolutely not a perfect, one-to-one comparison with federated protocols. It's also not exactly peer-to-peer. It's something in the middle, something that we can't predict what emerges because it's new.

In some cases, like social media, it will effectively be a federation. In others, more P2P-like. What that means, and what utility that has, I don't know.

0 sats \ 8 replies \ @kepford 21 May

Federations are far better than a single entity. The core issue is humans. I watched this all break down with Mastodon. I was a very early user of it and saw censorship and copy cats take over. This can and will happen to Nostr but at least Nostr doesn't centralize identity and it is easier to run a relay than a Mastodon instance.

17 sats \ 5 replies \ @LibertasBR 21 May

Yes, by default the same will not happen with Nostr as a whole. That's good, I like Nostr even though I know that massification is extremely difficult, I say this in agreement with what was said in this interview:

You have to be a bit more sophisticated as a user.

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @kepford 21 May

My main issue with Nostr is how people use it. I don't get nearly as much value from it as I do from SN. Why? Because its seems to be used like Twitter which really is low value IMO. It has value but its far too much of a drive by experience for me.

I write long form stuff here and share it on Nostr almost every time. I get near zero response on Nostr. Nostr is just to low attention span for my taste.

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90 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 21 May

Yep, way different dynamic.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @LibertasBR 21 May

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50 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford 21 May

Makes sense. Thanks.

I think bitcoiners and Nostr enjoyers often forget that the average person doesn't share their values or priorities. Nostr or whatever could be great but if the masses don't care about what makes it "great" then its for nothing.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 21 May

I shouldn't say "for nothing". That's not right. Its just that our expectations are often not realistic. Mostly around timelines.