I don’t really understand this kind of criticism (and not to pick on Will here, it seems to be from ~everyone).

Bluesky took a different approach - first build a product people want whose technology supports decentralization, and add the features the geeks want later. It’s easy to shit on their lack of decentralization, but Bluesky has made clear and consistent progress on that front since day one, and I assume they will continue to do so.

The result has been a product that’s growing (those user stats are pretty realistic, doubly so when you look at the number of accounts actually posting real content) way more than nostr with tons of anti-centralization features that nostr is missing (anyone can create a feed algorithm, and there are many, decentralized content tagging is a really cool innovation - different “adult content” tagging services, opt-in different moderation services, etc).

The federated model of Mastodon led to a trainwreck of fiefdoms run by weirdly obsessive and controlling mods, but Bluesky took that and addressed the issues by splitting moderation from hosting.

Sure, Bluesky’s hosting model means you don’t get the relay-redundancy that sets nostr’s censorship resistance apart, but that’s not all that hard to add in the future (with the sync assumption they make making it easier to make efficient, too).

Building the kinds of stuff Bluesky has on nostr is gonna take a huge investment, we can’t leave folks like Will stuck building critical nostr apps by himself. nostr:note1vpteqdxxlgkjndhghhlu4n47aj2sra5vgmdr465y4yfzwcshglvqrqann4

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The problem is that that they pitch it as “decentralized” when actually they’ve just repackaged some bullshit Web 2.0 patterns for building an app with fully captured users. If they were honest they’d just say they were an alternative to X instead of saying they were somehow open or decentralized.

And at that; if they were really honest they’d just say outright that they LOVE censoring people that don’t agree with their views.

See that’s not true. They have actually made material progress towards their decentralization goals and suggesting “it’s just Web 2.0 centralized crap” is just being intellectually lazy.

bluesky is very clever.

it gets people to provide hosting for the project, providing the marketable illusion of decentralization. but retains centralized control which they will never give up, and will use under the guise of “safety”.

its neo-liberalism as a digital platform. time to “spread some democracy” 😝

Except that’s not at all what they’ve built or what they’ve built towards. The whole point of Bluesky is that they separated hosting from moderation/censorship. Their goal is that individual users can select what they want to see or not see (which you may agree or disagree with as a design principle), which they’ve made great strides towards. I suggest you dig a bit deeper into how it works before you criticize it further :).

youre disingenuous.

youre a talking point repeater for the purposes of marketing.

no matter what legitimate criticisms of bluesky are pointed out, youll respond with “no thats not true. come check it out.” ended with an emoji. i wouldnt even be terribly surprised to learn you are a bot.

Alright, nice chatting with you 👍

I think bluesky _could_ be decentralized IN THEORY. They did design it with that in mind. But nobody has actually done it yet.​

Yep, basically that. They can choose to push it in the future (eg if they run out of money), or might not. Given they’ve gone a lot of work towards it I assume they’ll at least try, subject to potentially limited budget.

But in the mean time they added a lot of decentralized features that have lapped nostr in some domains (anyone can create a feed algorithm, even if it’s run centrally, is huge! Same for ban decisions being shared lists).

I disagree. Anything that is a “protocol” but has only one client isn’t a protocol or decentralized. It’s not intellectually lazy, it’s just true.

The fact that censorship is possible at all is a contra facto against bluesky.

Meh, every protocol starts with one client. That doesn’t mean progress hasn’t been made (most of the backend stack can be self-hosted with all the same data as the “official” backend, except one part AFAIU, which required a lot of work), nor that more progress won’t be made.

Yea, Bluesky has moderation, but that doesn’t mean it’s some centralized censored crap - especially if they manage to decentralize further and lean into the decentralized opt-in moderation design they have!

Sure. But when did bluesky start?….

2019. And i’m waiting to see what happens when their B corp runs out of cash. 😉

I think it speaks more to the culture of nostr. Very bitcoin culture tangential where if you're not with us, you're against us. Everything else is bad, fuck nuance, fuck actually researching and looking at facts. So long as you post "gm, zaps and DVMs are the future, NGMI", that's what nostr mostly is right now. There's a few high signal accounts worth following here but otherwise its just a bunch of noise. I'm probably part of that noise, hoping to change that soon.

HFSP

NGU

GFY

To some extent, but the “it’s not decentralized” argument *is* correct, I just think many haven’t dug in a hell of a lot deeper than that.

My main annoyance with a while back I checked in on it for some months and the discord felt like nothing was happening, and that it was a big tech project with no spirit. SourceCode repos were tumbleweeds. So them at some point they built out this thing which is in the marketing sense decentralized.

Meanwhile the speed and algo layer is all due to some huge hidden compute cost which is being paid by someone/VC. Feels like a trap. I'm checking it out and enjoying it but my key reservation is with hidden cost and ownership. Feels like my persona there is a product.

The nostr response that is like to see, if there is one, is for all the big relays to go paid and let us know and pay the cost of a bulletproof social network.

Yea, sustainability is definitely a big question, I assume at some point they’ll have to add ads (or a premium option) like everyone else. If they manage to redundant’ize the hosting before then (assuming that’s something they want), though, they may end up just eating all of nostr’s features….

People complaining here are probably just salty Bluesky is doing better numbers, and that the majority of users don’t care as much about the things they feel people should care about. Turns out most people just want to post about their lives without being attacked by nazis and bots.

Eho cares if more people are using it? There will never be HAMSTR on blue sky.

Nuff said

Woopdi doo they made a protocol that technically can be decentralized later on. Doesn't mean it is and they continue to significantly reduce the chances of it ever becoming freedom tech. It's still a twitter with no evidence that will change yet. I HOPE IM WRONG. Idc if it's nostr or bluebird I want to see government/elite resistant freedom tech and that shit is hard to build. How many Blockchains can be decentralized but aren't.

I don't even see how decentralization is possible at this point just by looking at their architecture. it's completely controlled centrally. I don't see how they are going to magically decentralize it to any useful degree.

matts post is pure hopium

Basically their architecture is “the thing that stores your posts” separated from “the thing that an app contacts to ask for which posts to show in the UI”. The first is trivially run today and federates no problem (ofc that’s easy). The second is runnable but hard just because of size. I don’t see why no one would run that, though, at least if you think nostr relays are sustainable.

the second thing being so large gives users the expectation that they can and should be able to see everything.

and if/when bsky "decentralizes", some users will say it's not worth it trying to keep track of the people they're following and give up, or they'll stay on the largest chunks of the network, the most centralized core.

Bluesky contemplates federated backends sync all data, so that concern only applies to nostr (relays), not Bluesky.

sync all data? from where?

sorry, i guess i'm learning still.

Bluesky separates the concept of the server that hosts your posts from the server(s) that clients connect to to fetch posts to display. The second group of servers intends to connect to every possible first group and download everything. It’s not like nostr where relays don’t sync.

is the expectation that the client servers would always look at the whole network?

I did a deep-dive on the code and the only part of the architecture that is not currently decentralized is the plc-service, which resolves the DIDs with a custom method. You can literally run any other component yourself. Arguably this is the most important piece, so criticism is valid. But it's not clear how to decentralize governance of such a system while preserving the UX. Bitcoin 'gave up' on trying by just piggybacking off physics with PoW for consensus, which was not obviously going to work when it was created. I think perhaps the ultimate solution is just to use Bitcoin for the ID consensus with something like the did:btc or did:ion methods. The incentives to host decentralized infra without a token are not strong. Even nostr struggles with this currently. https://app.ilograph.com/@mikestaub/atprotocol%2520overview/Protocol%2520Overview/_walkthrough/1

that architecture diagram looks insane. who is going to run all that?

Much of it doesn’t actually need to be run to decentralize. “Labeling services” are basically just entities publishing messages to add tags to users (for blocking/adult content/etc), so you can just skip that and not block, or someone can just run that part and you can “subscribe” to that with your own server for the rest…

Also the UIs are on there and obv that’s just an app.

Finally….. currently much of it is one “docker run” soooooo

That too, but even with the other parts. They have all the power and that's the important part.

Member twitters "decentralized" beginning? How about hangouts?

All it takes is one person to stand up and build a new app with a different server and that goes away. It’s very centralized in practice today yea, but that can change fast…..or not. Depends on whether someone pushes it.

Hope they do but many may fear they'll start from nothing more than a server and no connections if Bluesky deems them dangerous for whatever reason.

Take the risk and self censor with Bluesky for access to more content, or build on nostr and allow total freedom knowing you'll be able to connect to at leased %90 of the more limited user base.

Bluesky’s separation of moderation from hosting does reduce the chance of that pretty substantially. Unlike mastodon, where everyone is constantly screaming for servers to block each other, users can opt to do so without the operator taking that decision. Sure, the operator could as well, but the fact that they don’t have to (even if they think the content is objectionable) is pretty important imo.

But the only thing that sets nostr apart here is that clients connect to multiple servers. That’s….a very simple feature to add to any social protocol? They could just add that and be done with it and then we’d have nothing. Not sure they will, but…

Not seeing why they have to. They could let the individual tusks decided for themselves deleting content illegal for them to host. They don't though. Then again is another beast where the users seem to want it. 🤷‍♀️

Hmm, the did resolution part isn’t all that critical to the overall system, DID creation is basically just adding a DNS/HTTP record. I guess I don’t really understand your concern here, tbh.

Wrong. DID creation is generating a key and storing it on their central registry. The DNS part is just an alias like NIP-05 and has no significance.

Mike and Fiatjaf are correct on DID. Matt’s perspective needs some nuance. One of DID’s challenges is decentralizing the resolution layer so maybe pegging to sidechain might do the trick but I don't fancy tokens so not something I have a clear assessment of. DID can exist independently as long as it is retrieved together, both metadata and verification keys.

But all of you big boys need to zoom out.

** Firstly, Bluesky and Twitter today have become a reflection of the extreme polarization that plagues America - and that is incredibly sad. Nostr must remain non-partisan, enabling clients with footprints of Bluesky and Twitter, among many others in it - and it's up to people to pick relays and peek into different worlds within Nostr. .

Until and unless Bluesky opens up a client for the right wing folks and anyone else, it remains centralized. There is no need to talk about “what if”.

** Secondly, user adoption is key. Only thing to understand about Bluesky is that they knew who their target early adopters were and went for it. That's all we need to learn from them.

Who are Nostr’s early adopters? Tech folks (and it's not the 3 to 4 of you here but millions out there), bitcoin folks, people who need censorship resistance (investigative journalists, people from challenging places), people who are curious and those who just want to see all the client devs here succeed.

** Thirdly, listen to the users. Brazilian users were all here first but did not know how to find people who matched their interest. Then they left. I always see devs pissing on users for voicing out their problems instead of trying to understand the concerns.

Privacy is needed for some people - and while Nostr can’t provide it atm, don’t forget about it - open it up to any devs who want to focus on it.

**Fourthly - let your imagination run wild with Nostr use cases. Web5 was an incredibly simple and powerful decentralized platform but nobody understood the application side or impact of it globally. Man it breaks my heart to see it go but if there is anything you want to take away from it - start focusing on applications and use cases

** And lastly, one cannot just keep building stuff and then whining when nobody shows up. Builders have to go out there and start hustling for early adopters (i.e. figure out the persona of the target audience and creatively reach out). And then listen to them. Improve your product. And keep repeating the process - again and again until you hit your mainstream users.

Your deep dive missed the fact that they have a big central data hub that is ran by a single company that all apps hardcode and has all the network effect such that it is de facto impossible for anyone else to run another (and if someone did it would be inconsequential and useless since there would be no incentive for anyone to move).

Sure, but the only difference between that and nostr is clients defaulting to connecting to more than one data hub. It’s big in practice, but to suggest we should dismiss Bluesky out of hand and not bother to learn from the cool other stuff they’ve built because of that one difference is…. Weird?

Fair point, but that is tech debt not architecture debt. Apps don't have to hard code this, its just convenient for now. The source of truth is the PDS and you can self host that with did:web credentials. Eventually if the network gets to a certain scale, there will be SaaS companies like Supabase or Vercel offering 'ATproto relay as a service' so devs don't have to depend on them to build their apps.

Fair response, but I think you're not realizing how big this "relay" stuff can get. It's purpose is to download, store and serve ALL of the posts from a network that aims to be global, so we are talking about a lot of data (and a lot of connections to PDSes everywhere, one PDS for each human), so I think the only thing you can claim is that there will be 2 or 3 other companies running alternative "relays", like Cloudflare, Google and Amazon.

Even then it's hard to believe this will happen or that it would have a big impact because it would be mostly inconsequential -- 99% of the people will just use the default Bluesky (the company) relay, and if the Hunter Biden laptop is censored by the Bluesky relay, then the Cloudflare and the Google relay are also likely to censor it, right? Even if they don't, who is going to manually switch?

Or if some big influencer is banned from Bluesky then actually starts running their own "relay" for a huge cost, how many of the people who would otherwise be hearing from them would switch? How many people who followed Trump on Twitter joined TruthSocial in order to keep following him?

Yes, there will probably be only a few big world relays, just like there are only a few search engines. The difference is you can verify when relays are censoring which will incentivize them to be as neutral as possible, as long as there is one relay that is a good actor. It's actually very analogous to Bitcoin mining pools. Economics forces only a handful to exist, but as long as there is one transparent and fair option ( Ocean ), then the others can't collude as the switching cost is low due to the open nature of the protocol. It's the same with AppViews. This is all theoretical of course, time will tell.

How is this materially different for nostr relays? Sure, nostr clients connect to a few relays, improving censorship resistance greatly, but generally nostr relays are expected to have a large majority of all notes in the social context.

No, they are not. The entire idea of Nostr as a censorship-resistant thing was always that clients would connect directly to the original source of events as decided by the publisher, so if I follow you and you decide to publish only to relay.bitcoin.ninja then my client should connect to that server directly and fetch your notes.

Yea but in practice (a) clients mostly don’t, and for very good reason - probably you don’t want to leak your IP to everyone you follow and (b) the number of people with their own relay is very small, instead most users rely on some relay existing that will host everyone’s crap for free.

I guess if you ignore relative usage most clients in fact _do_ implement it (Coracle, Snort, Gossip, Highlighter, Habla, Yakihonne, Yana, Voyage). The ones that don't are in process of implementing it (Damus, Amethyst, Nostur, Nostrudel).

I'm pretty sure the reason why they didn't implement it in the first place wasn't because of any of these reasons, it was because of a misunderstanding of how Nostr was supposed to work, and also because they followed the example of my first client, which was badly designed and I left that relay part to sort out later because it wasn't clear to me how I was going to do it. Then later some people may have come up with reasons like IP leakage and whatnot to justify their poor initial choices (again, I take the blame for it).

In any case if we are talking about a Nostr in which clients _do not_ do the outbox model and just connect to a fixed set of big relays then I'll probably agree with you that Bluesky is better than Nostr.

On IP Leakage. Fiatjaf’s actions speak for themselves. He quietely included analytics that share IP addresses with third parties, without consent, then promoted it prominently on the front page of the protocol area. You can verify this yourself at https://nijump.me (warning: it includes spyware not found in the source). It’s concerning that other developers either ignored this or made light of it, instead of addressing the clear violation of trust. This behavior undermines claims of caring about IP Leakage.

this is concerning

How do we verify if relays are censoring in this case?

A user can search the relay for their post, if they can’t find it they can share a link to it existing on another relay. Just like nostr

When the elites pay them to cut out any one they say from connecting via this protocol to the main app with all the users they could. Sure anyone will be able to make a competitor on the same protocol or a different one but connecting together in a decentralized manner will require their permission because the way they built it to monopolize the user base.

When it was first announced, which was probably prior to much/any development, they were advertising it as a decentralized social media solution. Maybe I’m wrong, but that was the impression I got at the time from Jack etc

Yes and the design of the system is very much that. There’s still work to go but just saying it isn’t and writing it off is naive imo.

I think its naive to buy into a solution or product based on future promises

It's not. Their own people say it over and over and everywhere that they cannot decentralize the "relay" because the entire architecture assumes a single source of truth for all the data, all they can do is hope people will migrate to an alternative server in case the canonical one becomes malicious. PDSes are useless and meaningless because no one talks to them except the "relay".

They also cannot decentralize the identity system. Again, they say it themselves, and their plan is to give control over it to a more neutral party -- which you can say it's a good idea or not, but it's not decentralization.

The “relay” is an optimization and you can run your own. I think you’re confusing it for the actual data store, which can also run your own though indeed no one does. Maybe your info is out of date?

If there is only one central data source, then it would seem the benefit of having may independent data relays is only relevant in niche censorship scenarios. Lmk if I’m missing something

Yes, you’ve just explained nostr though?

What, an "optimization"? Are you suggesting that Bluesky would work today without the optimization, just slightly slower? Or what do you mean by that?

If your information isn't out of the date you probably know that nothing of Bluesky works without the "relay". And sure, you can argue, as you have elsewhere, that Bluesky can change to actually connect directly to PDSes, but then you will need to trash all the labelers, feed generators and app views and the client app codebases, as they all assume the existence of the "relay", and then you'll have to create a query language for the PDSes and proceed to recreate all of these things on the clients directly -- and then obviously you would have just created Nostr again (and then you have to start working on the same problems Nostr has been working on for the past years).

If that ever happens then great, we don't need Nostr anymore -- but if you are indeed following Bluesky you have probably read directly from the Bluesky creators that they do not intend to do any of this decentralized data-fetching stuff ever because they think it is a bad idea to not have a canonical centralized source of data, it's an irreconciliable divide and no "progress towards decentralization" can be expected from them, at least not decentralization in the way we understand it.

The comment about relay being an optimization was somewhat nitpicky, you’re just using the wrong term (technically the relay is a proxy between all the PDs’ and the app view, the app view stores all the posts too and you could drop the relay and replace it with the app view(s) connecting to all the PDSs directly).

The “App View” is a server that returns the posts to display in the feed to clients (eg the mobile app). In practice the App View is what *has* to have a full copy of all the tweets, much like a nostr relay works in practice today.

Clients simply making the same request to multiple App Views wouldn’t result in having to rewrite or throw anything away, I have no idea why you’re suggesting that - in general you’ll get the same response from each, just have to merge them on the client side.

But really I do not at all understand your comment here - literally the Bluesky devs encourage other relays to exist, and other people *do* run relays, just not very many because of the overhead. Suggesting that they view multiple relays as a bad thing is…. strange to me 🤷‍♂️

They have said over and over (maybe not in these words) that they think it's essential for apps to have a "guarantee" that they have seen all -- i.e. that users have read all that was written to them, or by someone, or with some tag etc -- that implies that the entire ecosystem of apps should rely on a single "relay". Their architecture diagrams also depict all the pieces talking to a single relay, their codebases all point to a single relay. There is no provision anywhere for an app that uses two or more relays.

Of course they will say it is possible for others to run alternative relays, and they want that only insofar as it will validate their idea of decentralization, but the truth is that if someone is running an alternative relay they will not be able to use any of existing online infrastructure -- they will have to run alternative versions of everything configured to point to the new relay URL.

If someone is running a relay today it's probably for hobby purposes, maybe not indexing the full network, someone trying to make their closed little sandbox of atproto, I don't know, a serious relay is already hard to run today, should get increasingly harder and virtually impossibly hard if Bluesky achieves its world domination plans.

Making the assumption that every relay is going to see ~every post is very much not the same as assuming there will only be one relay. You’re just putting words in peoples’ mouths, then.

And you are reading only parts of my posts and responding to those parts as if I hadn't said anything else.

Not sure there’s much else in that post? Only other point you made is that the only other relays are mostly for hobbyists stuff, which I think is mostly true. Don’t disagree so why respond to it :).

To be honest I have no idea of what this discussion is about anymore. If you stated the parts on which you agreed with me it would ease my confusion -- but I'll try to clarify now:

I guess I can say that (1) we both agree Bluesky is not decentralized today; (2) you think it can be decentralized if and when more people start running more BGS and AppViews, I don't think that will happen and even if it does it will be inconsequential; (3) you think Bluesky has some cool features like custom feeds and I agree; (4) you think Bluesky is getting really big because of these cool features and I think they play a very minor role in their growth.

Good summary?

You also seem to think Nostr is broken in many ways and not innovating enough, but these points are vague to me. I would like to know what cool features could or should be added to Nostr and what is more broken so we can try to fix.

I don’t *think* it will necessarily become properly decentralized, but rather that it totally *could* and they are working toward it (whether they run out of resources before they get there I dunno), thus I think dismissing Bluesky as “not decentralized, next” is naive.

But I can tell you for sure there the “custom feeds” feature, at a minimum, led to substantial early adopter/evangelist momentum. To a much lesser extent the decentralized labeling/moderation/censorship feature as well.

Even if they didn’t drive material user adoption, they’re cool features we should be learning from, not dismissing the whole thing “because it’s not decentralized”.

IOW there seems to be a string desire on here to dismiss Bluesky for trivial reasons (“not decentralized”/“they got MSM coverage so the user growth doesn’t mean anything”/etc) rather than admit they’ve built a product that resonates with a large number of people and that has cool features we should learn from!

Censorship resonates with a large number of people! Great! We are building for everyone else.

I think having an algorithmic feed resonates with people a hell of a lot more, certainly drove early adopters.

But, yea, people love filter bubbles (censorship being just one way to get that), that’s why most people are on nostr, too! :p

isn’t it just true to say that it’s not decentralized? There is a board, a legal entity etc.

it *can* change, but as it is today, it is centralized. Not some “string desire”, seems to be just objectively the case?

I don't know about your claims that the App View is the server that has to store everything. It's not clear what they do exactly, looks like they are just another soft-centralizing layer like a web2 backend that talks to the BGS (I'll start calling "relay" BGS because that's a much better name) and caches data for user consumption and also talks to users's PDSes on behalf of clients?

In any case given that to run a BGS today you need many terabytes of disk https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Notes%20on%20Running%20a%20Full-Network%20atproto%20Relay%20(July%202024) that must mean it is storing all the data. So we have both BGS and AppViews requiring storing all the data?

AFAIU you can have an App View that uses a relay, but could also be one software package. conceptually for the purposes of this discussion it’s really one thing.

Architectures that assume a single source of truth eventually become centralized (despite claiming to be decentralized) and a single point of failure. That’s the reality.

The alternate reality:

There is no single source of truth. Just signed events from authorities (npubs) that you may or may not trust.

There is no global store of signed events. Just signed events from relays you’ve connected to.

Once you realize this, the desire to police others goes completely away.

My 2s is that they're reacting to Bluesky taking centralized shortcuts that "will be fixed later". But like security and revenue, decentralization can't be "added later". Nor would the maintainers have incentive to add it later even if they could.

So if people are joining just to get away from X, that's their choice. But while Bluesky is pretending that they will behave differently from X "when the time comes", then they are at best fooling themselves.

They need to cast The Ring, or stop pretending that their future behavior will be any different.

I like real decentralization, I’m gonna stick with NOSTR 💜🏆

The point is that nostr is not real decentralization, and neither is bluesky. Each model has trade-offs. And can learn from each other. A good path to success is to avoid the "either/or" fallacy aka binary thinking. Satoshi was a master at this. In fact, the word decentralized never appears in the white paper, but distributed occurs 6 times!

What is the line for “real” vs “not real” decentralization?

I always understood it as a system has to be decentralized “enough” to overcome censorship, system failures, etc. That’s mostly impossible to quantify until the system is put under pressure in a real world scenario… but it is possible to identify systems which by design are not decentralized.

That line is a psychological line. http is a decentralized protocol, tho some will argue that it is not. But if it is the parent protocol of nostr, so anything nostr can do, http can do, and more. So if you think nostr is decentralized then http must be decentralized.

It might be useful to use the term "sufficiently decentralized". The term has become a slogan and a cliche in modern s/w engineering, in any case.

You could look at it another way. If the main bluesky node went down it could be critical. If damus went down it would be a pretty bad situation in nostr. If one particular website goes down it doesnt matter too much. If any bitcoin node or miner goes down, it will barely be noticed. If one pubky or bittorrent node goes down, the system is resilient.

Why would it be bad? Half the time I don't even use the damus relay. I deleted it for months. Didn't affect me at all.

It seems simple: can I instantly respond to a post unlike by sending with Bitcoin? If so, let's continue discussing. If not, then there's is no reason to discuss.

Will literally nuked the Damus relay and it had almost no noticeable effect (at least for me, or from what I’ve read of others’ experiences). And Damus is my main client, but I also use 1-2 others on occasion,

I don’t know much about BlueSky but it sounds like there is basically a single data server.

nostr:npub185h9z5yxn8uc7retm0n6gkm88358lejzparxms5kmy9epr236k2qcswrdp nostr:npub1melv683fw6n2mvhl5h6dhqd8mqfv3wmxnz4qph83ua4dk4006ezsrt5c24,

Since you seem to be defending the current or potential decentralization of BlueSky… how does it handle the current central data relay going down? Or, how do they plan to go from one to many data relays?

Sorry, the second question was meant to be more…

How do they play to add more redundancy in the data servers, and in that future state how would they handle it if the ‘top’ server went down?

I don’t think anyone is suggesting that Bluesky’s decentralization is here or substantial. It might be in the future, but it certainly isn’t now. The point is more that we should learn from their feature set, because they have some features that are very decentralizing of power within a social network, even though they run on centralized rails.

Cool, I can totally get behind that.

When you say “we should learn from BlueSky”, do you mean ppl focused on Nostr?

If no, then I’m lost on your point.

If yes, what specifically do you think BlueSky is doing right *as a protocol* that Nostr is doing wrong or worse? And specifically curious in the BlueSky “decentralized features” you mentioned.

Thanks

The ability for anyone to create a feed algorithm and share it directly as a post is the most obvious huge one. Decentralized opt-in moderation/spam filtering/tagging/NSFW-marking is the other.

Dont forget an important fact that Jack funds nostr to the tune of about 1 million dollars a month just to keep the lights on. Without that, you would see a very different situation. That is a central point of failure right there, that cannot be wished away.

Oh wow I didn’t realize he is doing this monthly, what a an OG 🏆

Its completely false

Is it? How much has Jack donated to Open Sats nostr fund alone? (I honestly don’t know, but wouldn’t be surprised if it was 10+ Million)

nostr needs maybe a couple thousand dollars a month to keep the lights on. Clients already exist and running relays is insanely cheap. Damus will keep working even money runs out. You can’t say the same about bluesky

The problem is software is not static and cannot be

You need to update it as the userbase scales and the environment changes, if that was not true, we could just not have NostrDB and still use Branle

You also forgot the human cost of operating servers and the gap in user count

I would not believe Nostr is cheaper to operate on a per user basis with little emphasis on cost and performancd optimization and redundant infrastructure.

Why not? What’s fundamentally different about Bluesky’s architecture that makes it more expensive to run?

I think about 56m but about half goes to btc. I would expect another 21m in march. Let's see.

If we’re talking about OpenSats, then I think there are 2 separate funds. Of course there are some projects that could qualify for BTC and NOSTR, but from what I’ve seen they don’t tend to give e.g Nostr clients grants from the BTC fund.

It's paid annually $21mm a year to open sats + more to other places.

You can average it to about $1mm a month. Folks could deny this, or that it makes a big impact on nostr. But that is not a serious argument.

https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/opensats-receives-21-million-from-twitter-co-founder-jack-dorsey

This doesn't seem correct. $5M in 2023. $5M in 2024. $10M in total since may 2023. Over 18 months. That would be $555K a month on average. But that would be if it's all spent as of today. We know that's not the case though since grants are paid out over the course of a year or several years in some cases. It's far, far less, IMO.

Yeah that is a great point. Centralization of a different kind

im honestly starting to think you’re legitimately redarded.

He might have a point except the money is being spent poorly.

NOSTR development is laughably inefficient. If there wasn't so much money available, devs would actually have to cooperate and focus instead of building garbage on top of garbage on top of garbage, before scrapping that and building new garbage.

I don't think much of that money is dedicated to hosting regardless, though. I think most people hosting relay and media servers are just doing it out of pocket. It's probably not an overly expensive thing to do at NOSTR's size.

im sorry, i feel asleep while you were talking. what?

one thing I think about is how the centralization of their funding might have affected their design. their architecture looks like what happens when you have teams that divide themselves into micro-services.

actually that makes alot of sense.

1 million per month? so it would be like 20 million so far just for nostr? who is getting all that money?

Well, I was just shit posting in a cute way lol 🫣 because I love NOSTR.

But, I suppose I should back up my words if asked. I would say decentralization fundamentally revolves around control, architecture, and governance.

Real Decentralization

- Distributed Infrastructure

- Interoperable Standards

- User Ownership

- Resilience Against Censorship

Illusion of Decentralization

- Federated but Centralized Governance

- Control Over Critical Infrastructure

- Opaque Decision-Making

- Dependence on Proprietary Systems

As far as I know Bluesky does use the federated AT Protocol, which is a step toward decentralization because it avoids a single point of control. However, federation alone doesn’t guarantee full decentralization.

In Bluesky’s case, while servers can operate independently, the protocol and its governance are still managed by Bluesky PBC (Public Benefit Corporation). I would say this means that while the AT Protocol provides a decentralized framework, the reliance on a central governing body places Bluesky somewhere between partial and full decentralization.

Real decentralization is about giving users full autonomy over their data, identities, and the underlying infrastructure, eliminating points of centralized control. The illusion of decentralization occurs when platforms appear decentralized but still retain centralized governance or critical control mechanisms. Platforms like Nostr align more closely with true decentralization, while Bluesky’s federated model still has centralized elements to address before it can fully achieve that vision.

Thou shalt not effort post in internet discussions on decentralization.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWrMGXwhFLk

😂🫂

These are thoughtful points, but I'd suggest focusing on "verify, not trust."

Nostr governance is highly centralized—one person has overriding control, often contrary to community sentiment ("It's my project, I can do what I want"). This has driven most grassroots contributors away, leaving a small but dedicated group, including great folks like Alex. Meanwhile, Bluesky's interoperable standards outpace Nostr's, though neither is perfect. Nostr's stagnation (e.g., no markdown, editing, or smart widgets) and resistance to scaling innovations have stifled growth.

Nostr absolutely does not have opaque decision making. It has a centralized king-maker effect with very caustic people at the top. Developers are told, "This is dumb", "This is stupid", "We dont need this", "We dont need relays", and even "Go back to where you came from". Overt and blatant racism is tolerated. 90%-95% of the grass roots have left, but thankfully Jack's amazing generosity keeps much of the project going.

Onboarding is another weakness—while Nostr champions user ownership, the steep learning curve drives users to easier alternatives like Bluesky, Mastodon, or Threads. Transitional tools like subkeys or delegation could help but remain unaddressed. Decision-making isn’t opaque—it’s centralized and often dismissive, with a "king-maker" dynamic that's alienating to developers.

Still, Nostr thrives on Jack’s support, powering good projects like Ditto and Chachi Chat. But sustainability remains a challenge, and much of the development feels grant-driven rather than user-focused.

The points you make a are great ones—just temper trust with verification. I've been here from the beginning, contributed heavily, and taken heat for pointing out issues. There's value in Nostr, but its slogans often need scrutiny.

I feel like you spend more time complaining about nostr than contributing anything of value. What are you doing to improve these weaknesses? Some of us are very much aware of these issues and are grinding away to improve them.

The governance issue is so dumb, there is no governance. Theres a few devs who have control of the nips repo. Guess what! You can ignore the nips repo, i left it a long time ago and have started to spec things on our own. People who find our specs useful can implement them (image metadata, private zaps, quote highlights). All rejected from the nips repo but *gasp* they still exist and people implement them.

Not sure why i waste my time with complainers, but i am going to stop wasting my time now. ✌️

Bluesky sucks because it is leaning heavily into leftist radical thought as a scaling strategy. It is creating a dangerous echo chamber. Their starter packs idea was really smart. They know how to scale, but people are using those starter packs As tools to block people at scale. they will hit a brick wall and they are not intellectually prepared for it

Wasn't BlueSky just another neutered Mastodon instance like Gab, but woth a mich shittier userbase?

No.

bruh

The current invitation-only model of Bluesky raises questions about its commitment to decentralization. By requiring an invitation code, the platform inherently controls who can join, which allows it to track and manage its growth—a practice more aligned with centralized marketing strategies. This approach might discourage some potential users, as it did for me last year when I decided not to pursue joining.

On the other hand, NOSTR embodies the principles of true decentralization. Despite its slower adoption and performance challenges, it operates without gatekeeping mechanisms, staying true to the ethos of an open and decentralized social media network. For me, this makes NOSTR a more authentic example of decentralized technology.

nostr:nevent1qqsxwej4y6jnc20wls5zh7523eerltm3h8x99uujgtuzhprja60e7sgpz4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezummcw3ezuer9wchsygpa9eg4pp5elx8s727mu7j9keeudpl7vss0geku99kepwgg65w4jspsgqqqqqqsae2q3h

Blues Sky está crescendo porque um bando de esquerdistas está indo pra lá, e de forma financiada. É apenas por isso. Não há nada de novo, ou melhor naquela porcaria que não tenha melhor no X. Portanto, essa sua leitura é, no mínimo, imbecil.

Blues Sky is growing because a bunch of leftists are going there, and they're getting funding. That's all it is. There's nothing new or better in that crap that isn't better in X. So your reading is, to say the least, idiotic.

It is such a challenge to explain to people that free speech enforcement is not decentralization for some reason…? People lie for personal gain - to game the network and assume status. They do this by finding a niche identity that positions them to blame half the network into a collective state of polarization. Polarization is the exact opposite of consensus. Decentralization has to be consensus for there to be organic self governance as opposed to centralized governance. We need to get away from this ridiculous idea that free speech absolutism works. Lying is not a right. nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m was on the right track with the centrist mindset at Twitter, but ever since then no one has been doing meaningful work on content moderation.

LOL go back to Reddit.

What exactly did I say that doesn’t sit right with you

This is the problem everywhere. Pretty widely held that a democracy of morons doesn’t work. What else is a marketplace of ideas if not voting in favor of ideas with identity formation and in-group affiliation. There’s a few ways morons respond. They don’t which is a type of response. They lash out or laugh off what you’re saying because they don’t want to contend with it intellectually. or they become curious because they have the humility to admit that they don’t know everything. I hope you are not emblematic of this community.