I’ve always wondered why the TBD web 5 project never connected more with Nostr. It seems like there’s some good interesting stuff there but I could never tell if anyone used it or if it got any developer traction.
Discussion
Indeed. I was following it quite closely at one point…
the tbd guys hated nostr and loved DIDs and DWNs. or maybe it was just daniel.
I always saw DIDs as a kind of NOSTR thing too and not as scary as some made out - a means to port your personal info across different protocols where you were in control of your ID and who could access it, not some third-party storing it. But hey-ho…
I think it was the eternal battle between perfection and pragmatism. People often say "worse is better" when doing something the "right" way has failed. I think it's usually meant to imply that there's some luck or non-functional advantage allowing the lesser solution to be more successful.
But the literal interpretation is in fact that the "wrong" way was better. Why was that? Is it really luck and better community, or is there something in our blindspot? I like to first look at complexity: things are always more complex than they seem.
If something looks a little more complex, you could easily find it is an order of magnitude more complex, and you just haven't looked into it. That's a lot of work for other people to use. Potentially a lot of additional costs that are invisible to the core group. As you get deep into a problem you can find important things that justify the additional cost to you, but to other people the numbers don't add up.
Which is why I like the sometimes brutal simplicity of nostr. There is room for improvement (keys keys keys), but the core is so simple and cheap to implement that it's very hard to argue. (Which is why non JSON formats NEED to be optional).
But there's plenty of room for distributed protocols. SSL has made centralization easy and fun, and the net has suffered as a result.
#HtP