Nostr Web Client

Oh, didn't realize you're Carvalho himself. Nice to meet you! As I say below, I've followed your work for a long time, well before I got into the space. Now I have to re-write my note to speak in 2nd instead of 3rd person 😅

On your critiques of nostr:

> Scalability/incentive challenges that result in only a few centralized relays, lacks key-delegation and identity-based routing, inviting censorship and data loss.

I agree on key management, but the rest of it is either wrong or has to be justified a lot more. A "challenge" does not "result" in anything. And there is identity-based routing in NIP 65 and other places.

PKARR sounds great, but again, why not bring it to nostr rather than pump your own brand? I'd love to see someone solve that problem on nostr.

I also have a problem with your thesis that DHTs "ensure scalability". P2P DHTs are pretty well understood to not scale. Hub-based DHTs can scale, but that's basically nostr's topology. You even say "the network scales seamlessly, supporting millions of nodes globally". Don't we need billions? Unless you're talking about shared homeservers, but, again — that's the same topology as nostr.

You claim that pubky is "not just another app or platform; it’s a paradigm shift". I'd argue that the paradigm shift happened as early as scuttlebutt, other protocols are just attempts to improve on their work, pubky being no exception. The attempt to claim all this stuff for your own brand is kind of sketchy.

We would have loved to have you over here on nostr for the last two yearse pushing forward web of trust, content curation, decentralized algorithms, identity-based routing, etc. These are things nostr developers have been working on for years now. They're just all still nascent because everyone has their own project to take care of. Nostr has a high level of redundant work happening compared to bluesky, pubky, etc. Which has its challenges, but I see it as a good thing.

I'm hard on pubky not because I'm a nostr-only robot, but because I closely followed your work for quite a while prior to getting into nostr development. I installed the wallet, read the slashtags docs, etc. So this isn't just a confirmation-bias opinion. I'd love to see all the effort that is going into pubky go into building on nostr. Unless you think nostr isn't salvageable? But apart from the DHT implementation, it seems to me like all pubky's good ideas could be retrofitted onto nostr.

Nuh 1y ago

First of all, Pkarr was shared with Nostr folks especially Fiatjaf from day one, the reaction was always either Nostr doesn't need it or we can't change the Identity now it is too late.

Secondly if you are willing to make a breaking change like Pkarr as the root identity, then might as well reconsider other unfortunate parts of Nostr that are bundled with the discovery layer for no reason, most importantly why would we use websockets and Nostr events as base API instead of HTTP verbs, headers, and semantics? just because Nostr made that bad decision? Why not build a datastore like WebDav and then advertise that event (PUT/DELETE) on Nostr relays?

Well, pubky core only engages with Pkarr and data stores. And it doesn't tackle discovery so Nostr can be that for Pubky or not.

But note that Pubky didn't take away anything from Nostr, anymore than Blossom takes away from Nostr, if anything wr just decided to use the tried and tested tech of web servers.

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Discussion

hodlbod 1y ago

Cool, well I think that's fair. Key management is a hard problem. If nostr can't solve it (somehow), then I agree, I don't think it'll succeed. Obviously I think we still have a chance to solve it without throwing away all our work so far, but I don't know enough about how PKARR works so I'll have to read up. I do think though that pubky is about as complementary to nostr as mastodon is. They can be bridged, but that's not a long-term solution, one network will have to win out (meanwhile blossom is pretty much orthogonal to both).

devsou.com 1y ago

nostr:nprofile1qqsfxrxw7y3h9hf0zczhelz57rdajse4mz63kn38xu3kkqx2kuv0ekgpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduq3vamnwvaz7tmzd96xxmmfdejhytnnda3kjctvqyvhwumn8ghj7erpwd5zumt0vd4kjmn809hh2tnrdaksrej4w0

Any plans for a browser extension?

It would be perfect if, e.g. Brave browser, embed this functionality into the browser itself. Brave is pioneering several initiatives like that (decentralized web).