My most charitable feedback - and I will be very happy if this turns out to be the case and I look like an asshole - is that you launched a public beta too early before all the "we mean what we say" items are in place.

I've been in - and leading - businesses like this before and I know how difficult the timing can be, but I've learned from my own mistakes and I think this is important: It's better to launch later than too early, leaving holes for disgruntled pains-in-the-asses like me to exploit. I'm pretty sure I'll regret my behavior later, so apologies in advance... But at the moment I'm pretty jaded and it has resulted in me drawing red lines around these sorts of things that need to be provided on day one, not as "promises for the future":

- Self-hosting as a first-class citizen. Maybe even above the alternative. More "you should self-host, and here's how. but if you simply cannot or don't want to, here's our alternative option" and less "We make it easy for you to not self-host, but if you want to for some reason, here's a link to some docs that may have been hard to find or not yet real".

- Client agnosticism from day one. If there exists only one client, and it comes with defaults that enshrine platform-sponsored indexers, "global" user lists, and other "easy onboarding" features, I'm going to be suspicious that the early choke-hold will ever loosen. I'm not saying this is malicious/intentional, just that network dynamics are what they are and this is how it works. The alternatives are painful and weird, but I believe they're necessary for ecosystem hygiene: attract early developers, incentivize them to build alternative clients; build the first "reference client" but cripple it a little so that it doesn't become dominant too quickly; provide SDKs that make it trivial for developers to build clients (and **foreground this** so that people see it before they see your client)... etc etc. These paths suck for user adoption - but that's kind of the point. User adoption is in conflict with the principles I'm describing.

- Decentralized from the outset. Use an existing social network (Nostr, etc.) to bootstrap users' experience - not your "platform"'s default network. how/why could there be something like "default global users" if a system is actually decentralized? I should start alone in a dark forest - which proves to me there is no central entity. From there let me discover peers in a manner commensurate with my interests and existing social graph: current social network peers who happen to use pubky, "follow suggestions" lists like following.space (ideally curated by not-you), etc. Again, this is bad for user adoption, but see above re: conflict.

That's a bit of a brain dump on what motivated my comments. You're right I could have been nicer and I'm sorry I wasn't. I've been on the receiving end of exactly this kind of feedback and it's frustrating when YOU know what your roadmap is and other people do not and misconstrue it. But because that's how this ecosystem works, its in **your best interest** to be so defensive that people simply cannot get the wrong idea.

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Of course these are all my deranged opinions and you nor any pubky users need to care. that's the beauty of building your own thing.

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Thanks for sharing. I appreciate the constructive feedback. I might come to Nostr more often if this is what I get to read :)

Oh yea, nostr is full of super opinionated blow-hards who know everything and some of them are even friendly about it once you call them out on it! 🤣😛