Nostr offers key-based access and some resistance to censorship, but has problems with scalability and delegation.
What do you think Pubky solves that Nostr doesn’t solve yet? Cc nostr:npub1melv683fw6n2mvhl5h6dhqd8mqfv3wmxnz4qph83ua4dk4006ezsrt5c24
Discussion
Can you expand on why you think Nostr has problems with scalability?
Oh, you are just repeating what that Pubky blog post says about Nostr? That was written by a person that is completely ignorant about all the things. Notice how immediately after they say point-blank that Bluesky has decentralized identity. Maybe it was written by ChatGPT?
it only has a scalability problem if you start from a megacorp mindset. when that goes away, nostr has less of a scalability problem than they do.
I asked for your opinion precisely because I am completely ignorant of the subject and yes I only reported what was written in the article.
So what is your opinion about Pubky? Can it be a resource for Nostr? Or is it a better alternative?
Thank you if you have time/want to answer.
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.
Thank you so much friend, I knew I could count on your experience 🫂🎨
I will add another dimension to this.
Whatever is possible in Nostr is possible in Pubky.
Not everything possible in Pubky is possible in Nostr.
Whatever schemes you deploy to achieve the features of Pubky won't be simpler or as resistant, but we could easily add signed event-based data and ofc we will have tools for syncing and mirroring.
Just change Nostr to PKARR, then we can fight about the data format later, man!
npubs can be self-generated and used with little or no dependency on infrastructure, such as relays.
That’s the superpower of #nostr
Also the people at pubky are really sensitive and kinda sussy
Aka they sell you out as soon as the Feds come knocking
Looks pretty much the same as https://zeronet.io ?
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...
> Pubky's idea seems to be that centralization 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.
This is a fair assessment, though some nuances are worth highlighting.
Firstly, indexer centralization primarily becomes necessary in Pubky if your application requires a comprehensive, network-wide view of all homeservers—this is in fact something essential for pubky.app’s social functionalities. Features like search, semantic social graph inferences, and others inherently demand centralization due to the resource intensity of crawling the entire Pubky ecosystem, much like Google indexing the internet. I'm not uptodate on Nostr developments, but I believe it might face similar challenges in this regard, although I may stand corrected.
Importantly, an indexer in Pubky doesn’t necessarily need to handle content distribution; it only needs to guide users to content locations. The verification of content provenance still happens at the homeserver level. Indexers cloning data and serving directly, however, can enhance user experience by improving responsiveness, and I anticipate the emergence of both lightweight and full-content indexers. We are building Pubky Nexus, a full-content indexer, but it can be strip down to become lightweight as well.
We envision multiple competing indexers evolving, akin to the variety seen in web search engines today, despite Google’s dominance. While fully decentralized content distribution may have limitations, I envision (and want to dedicate effort to it) niche users with sufficient resources and interests could potentially run their own indexers, though they naturally only index a partial view of the network. For what is worth, I would like to run one at home.
nostr:nprofile1qqsyvrp9u6p0mfur9dfdru3d853tx9mdjuhkphxuxgfwmryja7zsvhqppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qythwumn8ghj7anfw3hhytnwdaehgu339e3k7mf0qyghwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnhd9hx2tch2deau any chance of getting collapsible threads in comments? Reddit may have turned into a censorious hell hole, but their original comment thread ux was the pinnacle of web design. It's such a shame that almost no one else has copied it.
