Starting yesterday, I am no longer a Synonym employee.

I am thankful for John for taking a chance on me and empowering me for the past few years. without such chance I don't think I would have had the time, resources, or confidence to design what is now the foundation of Pubky.

I loved working with that team, and I am confident that they will be able to materialise what was and still is our shared vision for the Web.

This post is meant to clarify, for anyone who cares that;

1. If you are following me merely for being a Synonym employee, you should consider that I no longer speak on their behalf nor have access to anything you don't.

2. If you were interested in Pkarr or Pubky, then rest assured that I will remain a resource for you if you needed help, especially Pkarr as it has matured and won't change going forward, while Pubky still has a room for improvement and innovation and design challenges, and I might not be able to influence that, at least not in Pubky's name.

3. Once you feel the agency of designing and building, it is too difficult to stop, so while I might be distracted for some time consolidating and taking care of my responsibilities, I can't think of a future where I am not building the things I wanted to see in the world.

4. Usually developers don't abandon projects they are passionate about for lack of resources, but isolation and apathy can definitely take a toll, so I intend to start working very publicly again as I did very early on with Pkarr which caught the eyes of engineers (on Twitter) that helped me in many ways, and I am hoping this is a new opportunity to make more of these precious friendships.

where can I read about this?

I assumed you are shipping an actual browsers and not just an extension. If that assumption is true, you should be able to add anything you want if you are brave enough.. no?

No I want UDP and TCP sockets please.

I am ok with that, I think public timelines with infinite engagement was not good for anyone. And people managed to make friends before it, in forums, and even ICQ, remember that 😅

The scale of all my interactions and all the interesting conversations I ever had on Nostr is so small, and so nich and honestly so selective, that ActivityPub or mailing lists or any other message passing protocols would have been more than sufficient.

And this is a white pill.

No this is not accurate, DHTs aren't "not clearnet" .. browsers are the ones that artificially deny their scripts access to UDP sockets.

But since most users use social media through native apps, and since Web browsers can add support for resolving dns records over the DHT in a weekend (I guarantee it) if they want, I would say this idea that apps can't talk to the DHT through "clearnet" is wrong.

More importantly DHTs are inevitable at scale.

let's imagine the average relay can only supporting 5000 users, ok then you need 1,000,000 relays to support 5 billion users.

So best case scenario, if Nostr is super lucky to have 1,000,000 relay, you still have the problem that clients can't publish to and query from 1,000,000 relays.

So you have to start being clever and shard users over these relays, and now you realise that you need a DHT to do that reliably.

None of this matters though because the stakes of being wrong is too low. If Nostr fail to scale, or it scales and 90 of the 100 popular relays collapse while the remaining 10 have to raise VC money to persist. it won't matter to most.

In fact, already no one cares that these current popular relays are running on grants, and if that dried they will die or persist because the user base dwindled and the expense became lower.

Meanwhile the best bet I can make is that the current millions of DHT nodes will persist even if everyone working on Pubky dies, simply because Bittorrent found product market fit for us. and proved that the economics of the system is sustainable.

Yes, Pubky doesn't try to replace the cloud, just make domain names sovereign, because it is our position that the cloud most harmful aspect is your inability to leave without losing your identity, data and connections. but with sovereign domains, you have a credible exit that you can exercise when you need.

If you want to understand why do people think DHTs don't work, this is the reason, but instead of LND; IPFS.

Buggy implementations with lots of marketing can do this for a great design.

nostr:note1w6s6cewc8w39ztw3hw5nrq9t6gt2lpscf3ghvmhllh8senup3m5qtuaplk

And fuck IPFS and protocol labs, bunch of retards who spent millions of dollars just to destroy the reputation of good designs by horrendous implementations

Pkarr does not require the DHT to change topology, neither do bittorrent peers need to change the topology of anything.

I think you are thinking about Pkarr as if it is a holepunching/NAT traversal thing. It is NOT, but neither is Mainline.

Mainline is literally a sharded routing table, just like DNS, but instead of a hierarchy, a flat distribution of routing servers (all of which have port forwarding no need for NAT) .

so now the question is, could one million small nodes cope with the 8 billion people updating their homeserver/hosting provider once a year each? because that is the only Publishing we need.

As for Reads, well just like DNS, we have to cache the shit of it, but that is ok, we only need the DHT to work well enough and caches be refreshed frequently enough just so your followers to detect your super rare event of change your hosting SERVER

Seriously, if the DHT can't scale for this, then nothing can and the alternative is just ICANN, if you think a 100 Nostr relays can scale better than a million nodes AND stay open and censorship resistant, I need you to explain that to me and walk me through what is the innovation in relays that we didn't have before ... because DHTs literally exists because Bittorrent trackers (exactly same as nostr relays) couldn't both scale AND stay permissionless.

I hope that makes sense.

There is a prominent Bitcoiner who has been not only supporting the genocide in Gaza but unapologetically so with absolutely no interest in human rights whatsoever, pure medieval zeal... I am not judging or want any backlash against him, I appreciate honesty.

I do however hope he is having the worst time of his life hearing about Ceasefire news, and may we continue to enrage his racist ass by surviving and thriving.

Another day another bunch of zionists soldiers killed in Gaza, it is amazing that Palestinians still have fight in them, even if it is depressing how much their neighbours are conspiring against them.

Regardless glory to Gaze and death to zionists

zionists killed 1 out of every 10 human beings in Gaza, most of which are children and new borns, not to mention the devastation and destruction inflected on the barely surviving population

zionsim is an existential threat to everyone in this region and we will never be safe until it's eradicated

Not only are Palestinians still heroically killing zionists in Jabalia... one of them literally stabbed a soldier today, even after they ran out of weapons they are still fighting.

Death to zionists, and glory to everyone who is killing them.

Glory to Yemen and death to zionists

Few more zionists killed in Jabalia, may their names be forgotten, their crimes remembered and their killers celebrated and glorified generation after generation until we get rid of this cancer.

While fake "liberal" zionists waste your time and pretend zionism is not mutually exclusive with peace, actual zionists are trying to settle southern Lebanon, Northern Gaze and more of Syrian Golan heights

zionists have no interest in peace, and we will never see any peace unless they are destroyed

All glory to Ireland and death to zionists

zionists only feel safe next to dictators that kill their people, as long as zionism is empowered people in the region are faced with the option of being killed by dictatorship or zionists warplanes.

It is clear that in order to be safe and free, we will have to get rid of this cancer.