Nostr Web Client

Interesting. I’ve never heard of pubky but looks like it’s connected to synonym, which you can find in the footer here:

https://docs.pubky.org

So either pubky is a product of synonym or synonym is rebranding as pubky? Not sure

I like that pubky has a semantic social graph and uses neo4j to power it. But my fear would be that pubky is falling into the trap of trying to build a cathedral, making the requisite underlying structure like their DHT more rigid than it has to be, which is a major critique in my mind of projects like IPFS and bluesky.

I’m guessing pubky users truly control their private keys and their identities, which is true for IPFS but untrue for bluesky which (I think?) holds users’ private keys.

The biggest strength of nostr (in addition to the fact we hold our private keys) is that nostr is resisting the cathedral trap, better than any other protocol that anyone is actually using.

But the nostr ecosystem lacks a semantic social graph powered by a mature graph database like neo4j. This really needs to happen.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Jay 11mo ago

My thoughts exactly #yestr

david 11mo ago

I just looked up pubky on X. Looks like John is speaking at El Salvador today. And I see a short clip from John talking about pubky saying he’s learning from bluesky and nostr (what precisely, idk) and that pubky is being tested internally.

But no mention of any actual users. Or who are his customers and why they will want to use his products. Admittedly it was a short clip. But my impression is too much talking and not enough listening.

Jay 11mo ago

I'm at that point where I've talked much more than I've walked on this, so I'm gonna shut up and code 😂

david 11mo ago

Haha yup me too

Big Bad John 11mo ago

Why speak ignorantly about something relevant to you?

We use Mainline DHT, the most decentralized network on the planet,, as DND for Public Key Domains.

https://github.com/pubky/pkdns/

david 11mo ago

I think and discuss lots of things about which I know very little. Otherwise I’d remain completely ignorant about everything forever.

If I render an opinion or judgment about something, I do my best to indicate my level of confidence. Have I spent a lifetime studying the thing? 2 minutes skimming some random document? Somewhere in between?

I know a little, but not a lot about pubky. I’d love to learn more and be pleasantly surprised about what you’re building. I’m already happy to see you’re incorporating neo4j. Which means you will have easy access to neo4j graph data science library, including centrality algorithms like PageRank. Using neo4j, you can today calculate personalized PageRank and GrapeRank web of trust scores on close to 200k nostr pubkeys, and you can export those scores in a format that is easily accessible by any nostr client. The PageRank part uses neo4j GDS and takes roughly 15 seconds.

So here’s what I want to know: How long before I can run personalized centrality algorithms on pubky? Using real data with lots of real users?