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.

NostrErrorLog 1y ago

Pkarr was suggested to Nostr people probably a year ago or so. We have been working on our vision for the web since before Nostr existed, and we created Pubky to be what we think is the best design. So why should we retrofit it to Nostr conventions and make it worse again? Why should we be spending 2 years lobbying people to do make fundamental changes they do not want ro make? You see this all thru a lens of Nostr but it just isnt our world really. Its like asking us to make it more like Mastodon or Hypercore, no, we made it this way in purpose and we have great reasons for it.

Regarding DHT scale, it used for dns records, and it is very fast and larger than any other decentralized network, so it is weird to be casting doubt from beneath its shadow, no? Yes, all networks hit scaling challenges, but this is why we designed Pubky to put the user in control, to allow for central service in a safer way.

Why do you think we are claiming something prior to our own brand? We literally list every single alternative in the post as well as explain exactly what we do differently and how we use Mainline.

We are just another group of people with our own ideas about how to fix the web, we dont really owe nostr anything, but we are happy to engage with interested users and devs. It is what it is.

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Discussion

hodlbod 1y ago

> Pkarr was suggested to Nostr people probably a year ago or so.

Can you link to a conversation? I don't see anything on the nips repo. I can imagine why nostr devs would be resistant. But my point is that you don't have to ask for permission to build on nostr, you could just do it, then say "hey, look how well this works".

It's also fair that if you've had all this in the works since before nostr then you could say the same about us having NIH syndrome. But it's at least interesting that the momentum went with nostr, not slashtags. Maybe that's down to Jack Dorsey, but I think there's more to it than that. That's all on the social level, but you should at least ask why people are building on nostr and not discount it.

My point about DHTs is just limited to p2p networks. DNS doesn't really require that scale, and it seems like pubky also allows for shared network infrastructure, so it may be irrelevant. Nostr relays are really just ad-hoc DHTs, so it's more about how they're used than the technology itself.

Nuh 1y ago

tons of private conversations with Fiatjaf, and I showed it to Strfry maintainer in private too, and wrote about it here for a year and

https://primal.net/e/note18q4yrj5m2ekvkceq7qn3zqrsxf2w6uq0az2rp867hvz4p5r74wxsa2xchl