Looks pretty much the same as https://zeronet.io ?
I haven't looked too deeply into it yet, so I may be talking complete bullshit here, but so far my impression is that Pubky is 3 things:
1. signed entries published on a DHT that associate a pubkey with an HTTP server
2. HTTP servers that can host any file
3. a superstructure for reading content from these HTTP servers and turning them into a global social network
It's a very elegant structure that sound very compelling to me, but ultimately I don't see how it improves much upon anything Nostr has, and it has significant downsides and unsolved (hidden) problems that Nostr either solves or is trying to solve right now.
2 is cool, but not a very hard problem to solve once you have a way to find these user servers (and, also importantly, someone to host these servers mostly for free). Blossom is doing a similar job with files as first-class citizens.
2 is also not very useful by itself. To make a social network you need a way to efficiently pull content from user servers and display them to users. There is where they came up with 3, which sounds very similar to Bluesky's central big server which they call "Relay". It's a centralized system that cannot possibly become decentralized. It looks like Pubky has accepted that as the only way to do things, and they seem to be planning on hosting one such big server.
1 is trying to be the most decentralized, censorship-resistant system ever for putting out information about public keys -- and we may discuss if it achieves that or not (I am personally very skeptical that DHTs can scale, even though nostr:npub1jvxvaufrwtwj79s90n79fuxmm9pntk94rd8zwderdvqv4dcclnvs9s7yqzis going to boldly claim that this is not a topic worth discussing because "Mainline has already proven itself with its bazillion nodes and centuries of existence" truth remains that Torrents do not work without trackers, and no one knows what will happen with the DHT if it has to store billions of records from people all over the world -- https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/natures-many-attempts-to-evolve-a is one scenario), but all of this mega-decentralization is completely useless if you don't have a decentralized way to load content from people you follow and have to rely on a giant central server hosted by one big corporation.
Pubky's idea seems to be that centralization on content distribution is unavoidable, so they aren't even trying. The idea of Nostr is that such thing isn't unavoidable, so we are trying.
Discussion
Nope, that is short names. This is pubkeys. Imagine every user had uncensorable DNS for their npub. For free. You dont need an auction because pubkeys are unique to the user, and the user can prove they own it. Imagine you could click on a user npub in your client and it will take you to their own part of the internet they control (opt-in) could be anywhere, including Tor. A place where they can express themselves and excercise free speech, on top of nostr. And there's no way to censor it. It's much more like dnstr, zerobit is like namecoin which is harder problem.
zeronet has keys… you control your site that way
Havent ready it all. But how do you get a short name, what's the tie-breaker if two keys want one short name.
I think pubky is very sensibly only tackling one thing at a time.
And how is the DNS done? Is it censorship resistant?
It's a blockchain trying to enforce a single namespace... but okay, nostr can use the vast zeronet network and blockchain tech instead i guess 🙃
It uses BitTorrent, site updates are done using keys. I haven’t looked into it too much, but just sounded similar
The point isn't control. Having short names complicates things and makes it much harder to be permissionless and censorship resistance. Because it requires some mechanism to decide who owns what, and that boils down to either central authority, or a consortium, or miners of a block chain.
So, no, not only is Pkarr not like zeronet, we don't even encourage vanity addresses, we want keys to be like phone numbers, you own it, people alias it, and everyone is sovereign and happy.
nostr:npub1jvxvaufrwtwj79s90n79fuxmm9pntk94rd8zwderdvqv4dcclnvs9s7yqz
can you hypothesize a potential scalable and decentralized solution to short names or vanity addresses?
icann is dumb and must go, but its a step backwards to have to relay a 56 character string as opposed to a 4-10 memorable one.
How many website domain names do you really know from memory? With the recent inflation of TLDs we can never be sure if a website is .com, .org, .io, .net, .ninja, .social, .pub, .app, .sh, .xyz and dozens of others.
Dozens, if not hundreds. I am sure an average person remembers or can easily come up with at the very least 5 domain names for products and services he often uses just by adding a .com to the companies name. Also if .com is not the extension of the site you are looking for you can quite easily substitute it to other TLDs that make sense in your context and with high probability get to the website you are looking for.
I tried downloading, installing and using Zeronet... Nothing ever loaded, it just kept saying something about announcing or trackers or something like that...