This is a great answer!
Also, I learned that the two protocols could be made compatible but sadly they use different cryptographic curves (pubky: ed25519 vs nostr: secp256k1) which makes this kinda problematic.
lol, brand new, still in beta. It’s basically a P2P protocol for “home servers” (just think relays) and then personal “domains” (think keys). Similar in concept to Nostr, except the record of users is placed in the DHT, so it’s insanely censorship resistant and if you ever want anyone to find you or your content, nobody can take down your DNS record because it’s stored through the BitTorrent network.
So there are solid censorship resistant benefits to pubky, but the server model is more traditional, where you don’t really have control, you are just using their server space. You don’t sign every message like you do in #Nostr. Great for UX because you don’t have to keep keys online, but a trade off on trust because each “relay” has the ability to arbitrarily change your messages (like Twitter or any other server).
So my take on Pubky v Nostr nostr:nprofile1qqsw4v882mfjhq9u63j08kzyhqzqxqc8tgf740p4nxnk9jdv02u37ncxzszx8:
the trust relationship is worse in Pubky in some regards because all activity isn’t signed by the user, decentralization makes the likelihood of abuse slightly higher, but the UX of just having to “sign in” and it works as expected and you can use as many clients and servers as you like, plus run your own at home is a solid benefit, and the censorship resistance of the DHT is probably best you can get.
Honestly I think they can be used in tandem where each is optimized for a particular piece of the puzzle. Delays and DHT domains could be used with Nostr. It’s a matter of the right tool for the right job. Curious how each will be used in the long run. Watching both closely
Discussion
John actually said you could create a Nostr key from a Pubky pretty easily during the demo. I specifically asked and he seemed to think it wouldn’t be hard, but I’m not sure exactly their relationship or how you’d go about it
Then I might be wrong about this.
I think the compatibility would help in a hard-core censorship scenario. If all bootstrap relays like purplepag.es or damus are methodically censored on the dns level, there is no starting point to discover users relay lists.
In this case some trustworthy pubkeys could just run a homeserver relay and the pubky protocol essentially allows to access those in such a scenario.
Also, anyone could run their own personal relays in a censorship-resistant way. Say you are Alex Jones or on some high-level blacklist, you would run your stuff on pubky, so you have a censorship-resistant pointer to your relays.