Have they said anything about what they will use for payments? Will it be KYC/AML usd payments or something else? Isn’t one of the devs on their team a former zcash dev?
This is the best in-depth dive in to how bluesky works from a code / infrastructure perspective that I’ve seen. I think anybody trying to understand and build Nostr should take a look. In a ton of ways atproto and nostr are siblings in how they work. It’s all the same stuff but slightly tweaked and in different proportions.
We have relays, they have relays. Their events are defined by signatures of the event and so our ours. They’ve got some differences, Nostr does casual ordering by timestamp whereas they’ve got a kind of merkel tree as part of the event. Their clients talk to a PDS server which holds keys similar to nsec bunker, but it also acts as a personal relay, which we have but not everybody uses. Our labelers are any nostr user or bot, whereas theirs a specific cloud service middleware. We’ve got DVM’s and other middleware which can generate custom feeds, but it’s not needed, clients can do their own thing or decide sorting. Whereas custom feeds in atproto are more core and extensible.
They plan to add payments and a DVM type service, but haven’t gotten to that yet, where as we have zaps already.
Because of the way bluesky has control over who can connect to their relay and submit data to their servers, users on the main bluesky network have to receive their content with their moderate bot labels via both AI and the Ozone app.
Bluesky supports arbitrary datastructures and lots of kinds of apps beyond the twitter like microblogging, but as far as I know nobody’s built one. Where as Nostr has tons of weird interesting apps.
Discussion
They haven’t said, but Jay the CEO of Bluesky was a developer working on ZCash for a couple of years. Some of the other folks have experience in blockchain projects as well. I think folks shouldn’t jump to conclusions based on the current user base of Bluesky. The current users didn’t want them to open up and decentralize, and that’s the plan from the start, and it’s slowly happening.
I also know that there were talks about merging bluesky with reddit’s decentralization project, but that fell apart because the reddit folks really wanted to use their own token, similar to farcaster. Whereas the bluesky team wanted their core protocol to work without any core integration to a token or coin, more similar to how Nostr works.
What I suspect will happen is that bluesky adopts a similar hybrid approach which is what we have in Nostr. Some clients like primal use a KYC’d custodial wallet with apple’s approval and ability to buy sats via apple pay. Others let you use a custodial third party wallet like Alby via NWC. And yet others integrate with entirely non-custodial wallets.
There are a lot of regulatory issues, both with governments and appstores. It’s not as simple as saying, KYC/AML be damned. For example, Primal on iOS is a hell of a lot easier to use zaps because they’re following rules that make apple and regulators happy. Sure you give up privacy and pay an apple tax, but it’s SO MUCH EASIER to setup.
That makes sense. I wasn’t trying to jump to conclusions, was more just curious if there were any details. I’d assume since they are a company, and Bluesky is the only client right now (I think?) they’d have to be much more cautious with how the go about enabling payments. Thanks for the info!
There is Graysky. It's opensource on github.com/mozzius/graysky with an APKs available for download. From my (somewhat limited) testing it seems better than the official client.