UX is WAY easier when the protocol isn't actually decentralized and there is just one major client run by a company with big money backing it.
Discussion
Bluesky is a company. Nostr is a bunch of unpaid or underpaid weirdos coding independently in bedrooms around the world and they mostly don’t listen to each other or ever agree on how anything should be implemented.
it's a bunch of weirdos - critical point
Keep it weird sir
nostr:note16tn0w4slwa9k3uh9seq3jr9lkkpg6sm4nd560p93gq9t4jgxrp7smuftjl
That’s part of the charm
LMAO. Now see, you're making me like Nostr too much.
Ironically most Nostr clients have better UX than bluesky
Only Ditto comes close. bksy is clean and neat. Should work way better t han most nostr clients
Idk, bluesky didn’t work as well as primal when I used it a couple months ago. Primal actually feels smoother than X for me
X resets to the home page if you close the app for 5 minutes. It also automatically refreshes, so I always lose something that looked interesting. There are a fuck ton of ads and reply guys.
Primal remembers where you are in the app no matter how long it’s in the background, no ads, no reply guys
Nostur is a sleeper masterpiece. It supports multiple users, and even keeps a local copy of my follows and offers to restore them in case another client publishes the wrong list, which has happened to me a few times!
Order out of chaos.
Are you saying we refuse to take bad advice here? 😂🫡
Sir I'm coding in an attic
I'm coding in my bedroom and have no idea what I'm doing.
I’d classify them more like misfits 😄
Don't listen to or agree with each other 😂 so accurate.
Does Bluesky have big money behind it? I did not know this. I thought Dorsey was the big money before the mob ran him off the platform.
Yes. Just a bit of cursory searching shows they raised $8m in seed funding in 2023 and another $15m in 2024 from various backers.
According to TechCrunch, here's where the money came from:
Seed Round of $8m
Series A Round of $15m
Ohhhhh... so backers are putting more in. Very intriguing that the 2024 seed round involved crypto backers, even though Bluesky says they won't take that route. 🤔 So the question is, what are those backers getting in return? 🧐
Well, I mean, most of us are just volunteers and the few that get paid, are kept on such a low budget that they struggle to retain staff.
We have like 10 people working on our nostr:npub1s3ht77dq4zqnya8vjun5jp3p44pr794ru36d0ltxu65chljw8xjqd975wz project and none of us earn any money for it, except zaps and subscriptions. So, we can't fully concentrate on the project and coordination is haphazard because we're all off at our day jobs and side-gigs.
Well, except Primal, but even they aren't high-rolling like Signal or BlueSky or whatever. I think Signal was just doing a $50 million dollar funding round, for what is just a DM app.
This seems important. 🤔
On the positive side, Nostr projects have brutally-low operating costs, which is incredibly sustainable. That's why it's been going for nearly 5 years on nothing but shitposts, cat pics, dev fights, and Bitcoin dust. And it has been getting steadily better.
The other projects need tens of millions of users and millions of dollars of donations, to even justify their existence and cover costs. If our stuff ever takes off, the financial upside is ginormous.
It will take off organically like bitcoin. It enriches everyone, as opposed to only enriching some corporation controlling it. That is revolutionary and it takes time to grow but as it does it becomes completely unstoppable and will eventually overtake the old paradigm.
Yeah, I've seen this effect a few times in my life, so I'm probably calmer about this, than some of the younger devs.
I suspect there will also soon be more large teams forming, and that will boost everything quickly.
I'm also not complaining. We're actually surprisingly productive, for such a messy, asynchronous project structure. Just have to get the DevOps straight, push comms, and let people manage themselves.
Not just money, but certain design choices too, like lexicons.
Lexicons I think are pretty critical for a decentralised protocol to not get all messy. Ironically ATProto, currently the far more centralised protocol, has them well defined, and Nostr, currently the far more decentralised one, does not.
Nostr has Kinds and NIPS and all, which are collaborative and good, but are definitely a little more loose around the waist in comparison.
Yeah, that happens when there is no main authority who folks look to as having the final word. 😂
Rules, not rulers is harder to build, but also harder to topple.
I'd argue ATProto lexicons are more decentralised than Nostr NIPS. If you zoom out it's a different story—but just zooming in to that one specific aspect then that's how it seems.
Nostr can do truly decentralized, but it's specialty is arguably distributed. So, overlapping pools of centralization, that npubs can travel through, or hop over.
Yeah I think that's a pretty good summary. Wouldn't want to attempt a diagram though.
We're diagramming it. 😁 Or, rather, visualizing it and making it navigable.
Thank you for sharing this info. It really helps me understand Nostr from the dev's perspective and be more patient with any tech issues considering the challenging decentralized objective.
It seems like it's worth the tradeoff?
From reading that article, Lexicons just sound like various note kinds, which are defined in the NIPS.
For instance, a kind 1 post is just a short text note and most clients can display kind 1 notes fine. They may make choices about how they render certain text within a kind 1. For instance, an image URL contained in a kind 1 is often rendered as the image itself. Same thing with video URLs. But a client could just render the URL text and make it clickable to open the media in a separate tab.
Meanwhile, there are also specific media kinds, too. Such as Kind 20 for images, kind 21 for videos, and kind 22 for short-form portrait videos.
You can find the definitions of all of these kinds and what they can, should, and must contain in the NIPs repo here:
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips
Most of them are pretty well defined. You will find that some clients don't always follow these definitions, though...
Sort of but Kinds here can be pretty loose. Lexicons on ATproto can get very tight. Like taking Nostr Kinds and putting them in a Hollywood spy movie where the technician looks at the monitor and says "enhance". You've got schemas, and then sub-schemas, and even sub-sub-schemas.
It would be like Nostr having a developer-defined sub-schema for embedding, say, javascript charts in Kind1 posts. So ATporoto lexicons are living things. Kinds here tend to get locked down a little early (like we just hit "save and publish"), and if you a client wants to go down certain alleyways then either it's up to the client to just go down those alleyways and see, or there would be a need for a new Kind.
It's not so much about centralisation since ATproto lexicon development is pretty decentralised (arguably more so than Nostr). It's more about the way they're perceived.
Yeah, but everyone knew that, going in.