Nostr Web Client

Read it. Agree with the general idea and I'm definitely not against corporate led initiatives. I think it's also misleading to associate nostr with the bazaar that is described there. Just like with the Linux kernel, there is strong protection of NIP-01 (and a few others) here. It is not up for grabs.

A major omission here is: protocols. We are talking about networks and network effects not products, as most of the examples he gives.

Regarding growth, I don't know where those numbers come from but I'm sure nostr has a way bigger brand than Pubky. It's simpler to understand, too. I perused Pubky docs and there is not a single hint on how to build anything. I'm also lost with so many brands: Holepunch, Pear stack, Keet, Synonym, Hypercore, Pubky, etc.

And John is a perfectionist. I understand because I am too. It has its good and bad sides. Specifically to bootstrap a network and get network effects a perfectionist approach does not help. Just to give two examples OSI was technically more perfect than TCP/IP, Betamax was technically more perfect than VHS - and they both lost. I'm focusing on building something great but NOT at the protocol level.

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Big Bad John 1y ago

I don't see Nostr as a pure "bazaar" either. It’s a nuanced network with both ad hoc innovation and strong adherence to foundational concepts. But my analogy is more about ethos and how it expresses—community-driven chaos vs. intentional, centralized coordination.

What holds nostr together is a culture, not a structure or plan or goal.

As for protocols, I’d argue Pubky is all about protocols. PKARR, Mainline DHT, homeservers—these are building blocks for networks, not just products. If that's unclear in our docs, it's because we need to evolve them, but, quite honestly, if I can understand it, you can too.

Things will be clearer and more tangible once Pubky App is in public.

What you call perfectionism I call design requirements. We are building an ecosystem and comprehensive vision, made of multiple moving parts. Perfectionism has nothing to do with it. We are trying to build a whole new web, not an app, and not a playground of hackathon projects. And we are trying to do it with as little complexity as possible.

Building decentralized systems is more like designing the internet than choosing VHS over Betamax, or Twitter over Primal. You don’t get many chances to fix foundational errors later. I’m not aiming for “perfect”, I am aiming for viable, empowering and useful.

The vision is for an alternative digital society, The Atomic Economy, and I am taking the opportunity to build it very seriously.