the truth is that opensats is burning money on gimmick projects

I think about 56m but about half goes to btc. I would expect another 21m in march. Let's see.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting that Bluesky’s decentralization is here or substantial. It might be in the future, but it certainly isn’t now. The point is more that we should learn from their feature set, because they have some features that are very decentralizing of power within a social network, even though they run on centralized rails.

The “relay” is an optimization and you can run your own. I think you’re confusing it for the actual data store, which can also run your own though indeed no one does. Maybe your info is out of date?

Will literally nuked the Damus relay and it had almost no noticeable effect (at least for me, or from what I’ve read of others’ experiences). And Damus is my main client, but I also use 1-2 others on occasion,

I don’t know much about BlueSky but it sounds like there is basically a single data server.

Its completely false

Dont forget an important fact that Jack funds nostr to the tune of about 1 million dollars a month just to keep the lights on. Without that, you would see a very different situation. That is a central point of failure right there, that cannot be wished away.

That line is a psychological line. http is a decentralized protocol, tho some will argue that it is not. But if it is the parent protocol of nostr, so anything nostr can do, http can do, and more. So if you think nostr is decentralized then http must be decentralized.

It might be useful to use the term "sufficiently decentralized". The term has become a slogan and a cliche in modern s/w engineering, in any case.

You could look at it another way. If the main bluesky node went down it could be critical. If damus went down it would be a pretty bad situation in nostr. If one particular website goes down it doesnt matter too much. If any bitcoin node or miner goes down, it will barely be noticed. If one pubky or bittorrent node goes down, the system is resilient.

The point is that nostr is not real decentralization, and neither is bluesky. Each model has trade-offs. And can learn from each other. A good path to success is to avoid the "either/or" fallacy aka binary thinking. Satoshi was a master at this. In fact, the word decentralized never appears in the white paper, but distributed occurs 6 times!

I don’t really understand this kind of criticism (and not to pick on Will here, it seems to be from ~everyone).

Bluesky took a different approach - first build a product people want whose technology supports decentralization, and add the features the geeks want later. It’s easy to shit on their lack of decentralization, but Bluesky has made clear and consistent progress on that front since day one, and I assume they will continue to do so.

The result has been a product that’s growing (those user stats are pretty realistic, doubly so when you look at the number of accounts actually posting real content) way more than nostr with tons of anti-centralization features that nostr is missing (anyone can create a feed algorithm, and there are many, decentralized content tagging is a really cool innovation - different “adult content” tagging services, opt-in different moderation services, etc).

The federated model of Mastodon led to a trainwreck of fiefdoms run by weirdly obsessive and controlling mods, but Bluesky took that and addressed the issues by splitting moderation from hosting.

Sure, Bluesky’s hosting model means you don’t get the relay-redundancy that sets nostr’s censorship resistance apart, but that’s not all that hard to add in the future (with the sync assumption they make making it easier to make efficient, too).

Building the kinds of stuff Bluesky has on nostr is gonna take a huge investment, we can’t leave folks like Will stuck building critical nostr apps by himself. nostr:note1vpteqdxxlgkjndhghhlu4n47aj2sra5vgmdr465y4yfzwcshglvqrqann4

3blue1brown may be the greatest educator that has ever existed. I've learned more from his channel than I have during my entire ~20 years in school.

hahaha... wish I got yu like that. but nah, I was clueless. lol

#onlyzaps