The Bluesky team has an academic paper describing the protocol that’s a pretty good high level but somewhat technical overview. It includes how they see Bluesky compares to Secure Scuttlebutt, Nostr, Farcaster, and ActivityPub/Mastodon.
I think folks who are building Nostr apps or advocating for it in comparison to Bluesky would do well to read it to understand what they’re doing and how we’re different.
We should also write up one for Nostr.
Nice, thanks! 🙌
Reading now thanks for sharing! You gonna write the nostr one? 😉
Your husband ever gonna fix it so I can use #DAMUS again?
I mean seriously: how damn rude are you?
Settings > first aid
Did it again from Damus
Checked my iPhone settings
Still can’t post on Damus
Something is broken and it may be my brain
I think we should write a Nostr one actually. Yes.
I've never written an academic paper but I have written a lot of other stuff. I'd be willing to help.
Same
This is my only peer reviewed paper presented at a proper academic conference.
That will be 100% amazing
And maybe an innovative way of how people collaborate will start showing up during the process
Bookmarked and saved on my longread list 🫡
Bluesky only works with Bluesky's own code.
Thanks for reading my paper.
We’ve submitted a proposal to an international society to organize a conference on decentralized social networks, with Nostr as the main topic. Fortunately, the proposal has been approved, and we’re now working out the details. I’m actively trying to align the conference dates and location with next year’s Nostr events. The goal is to introduce Nostr to academics and promote further research. Hope everything goes well.
this is very interesting I'd love to know more about it! Also keen on doing academic work related to Nostr.
📌
nostr:note127gr256lylsn89g8ac39smwk33mw2k74wtm65n78wxnswggl9l5s6tzk0s
asked chatgpt to summarize it, and some questions about network resilience: https://chatgpt.com/share/6712b746-3dc8-8007-8166-b2b4b0c5219e
#Nostr protocol is much simpler. Applying Occam's razor, it seems that Nostr has an advantage.
The documentation of the khatru relay project is a great example of maximum effort nostr documentation https://khatru.nostr.technology/
Thanks for sharing!
And for folks that are wondering there are Nostr academic papers too.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=nostr+protocol&oq=nostr+protocol
WTF, they actually gave up entirely on sovereign identity?!
"In principle, the cryptographic keys for signing repository updates and DID document updates can be held directly on the user’s devices, e.g. using a cryptocurrency wallet, in order to minimize trust in servers. However, we believe that such manual key management is not appropriate for most users, since there is a significant risk of the keys being compromised or lost.
The Bluesky PDSes therefore hold these signing keys custodially on behalf of users, and users log in to their home PDS via username and password. This provides a familiar user experience to users, and enables standard features such as password reset by email."
I'm not sure what they're getting at with their description of Nostr
"Communication (e.g. reply threads) is only possible between users who have at least one relay in common"
That's true of any client-server architecture no?
It sounds like they haven't heard of the outbox model
Also this isn't true
"there is no federation among relays"
The section seems a bit dated
80% of nostr misunderstanding (particularly wrt scaling) comes from not understanding how something like outbox would work.
which is fucking retarded.
the “public square” use case of nostr basically implies (something like) outbox; it’s like saying nostr can’t work because people can’t do math that quickly since the spec doesn’t mention computers.
We don’t document the relay federation stuff in the nips so it’s easy to understand why they’d miss it.
not necessarily, one good example is LN we don't need to have a direct route between us, the payment is transmitted to many nodes/users in a graph mode until reach me.. But it's done indirectly.
Bluesky is a shitcoin
☺️
Use simplex and just add a searchable directory of available groups. Then you have a secure, properly decentralised, meta data free Telegram upgrade without a CEO. Job done. Don't reinvent the wheel.
Martin Kleppmann is very good at this stuff. He also helped design bluesky. I honestly thought nostr was better than bluesky at the start. But they have worked really hard to improve every aspect.
Rabble, you're perhaps the only person that could write such a paper.
Thanks for the share, as a fellow protocol nerd it looks like an interesting read.
On writing a Nostr breakdown paper I'd potentially be interested in collaborating on something like that of anybody was looking for volunteers - though it's important to note I've written zero academic papers (unless college essays count).
Though I did write a blog post comparison of the big three a bit back. An earlier version of it actually got featured in the O'Reily trend newsletter (May of '24) which was super cool. But definitely not anything academic.
Why did they rename BGS to "Relay"? That is very unpolite, we took that name first. Also BGS ("Big Graph Service") sounded better.
Maybe we should rename Nostr relays to something cooler.
NDU: Note Dissipating Unit
CXS: Content Exchanging Server
ANN: Availability Named Node
RSS: Reachability Spreader Service
LGBT: Local Graph Broadcasting Transmissor
I vote RSS
SaaS: Server as a Spreader
