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Why didnt nostr build on one of the other incompatible designs that existed before it?

Why is it ok for you to act NIH about Nostr, but not for people to invent things outside of Nostr?

Why are we discussing loyalty and emotion in a tech conversation?

If you are curious, we made this megapost that guides you through the Pubky system.

https://medium.com/pubky/pubky-the-next-web-3287b35408f1

Replying to Avatar hodlbod

Oh, didn't realize you're Carvalho himself. Nice to meet you! As I say below, I've followed your work for a long time, well before I got into the space. Now I have to re-write my note to speak in 2nd instead of 3rd person πŸ˜…

On your critiques of nostr:

> Scalability/incentive challenges that result in only a few centralized relays, lacks key-delegation and identity-based routing, inviting censorship and data loss.

I agree on key management, but the rest of it is either wrong or has to be justified a lot more. A "challenge" does not "result" in anything. And there is identity-based routing in NIP 65 and other places.

PKARR sounds great, but again, why not bring it to nostr rather than pump your own brand? I'd love to see someone solve that problem on nostr.

I also have a problem with your thesis that DHTs "ensure scalability". P2P DHTs are pretty well understood to not scale. Hub-based DHTs can scale, but that's basically nostr's topology. You even say "the network scales seamlessly, supporting millions of nodes globally". Don't we need billions? Unless you're talking about shared homeservers, but, again β€” that's the same topology as nostr.

You claim that pubky is "not just another app or platform; it’s a paradigm shift". I'd argue that the paradigm shift happened as early as scuttlebutt, other protocols are just attempts to improve on their work, pubky being no exception. The attempt to claim all this stuff for your own brand is kind of sketchy.

We would have loved to have you over here on nostr for the last two yearse pushing forward web of trust, content curation, decentralized algorithms, identity-based routing, etc. These are things nostr developers have been working on for years now. They're just all still nascent because everyone has their own project to take care of. Nostr has a high level of redundant work happening compared to bluesky, pubky, etc. Which has its challenges, but I see it as a good thing.

I'm hard on pubky not because I'm a nostr-only robot, but because I closely followed your work for quite a while prior to getting into nostr development. I installed the wallet, read the slashtags docs, etc. So this isn't just a confirmation-bias opinion. I'd love to see all the effort that is going into pubky go into building on nostr. Unless you think nostr isn't salvageable? But apart from the DHT implementation, it seems to me like all pubky's good ideas could be retrofitted onto nostr.

Pkarr was suggested to Nostr people probably a year ago or so. We have been working on our vision for the web since before Nostr existed, and we created Pubky to be what we think is the best design. So why should we retrofit it to Nostr conventions and make it worse again? Why should we be spending 2 years lobbying people to do make fundamental changes they do not want ro make? You see this all thru a lens of Nostr but it just isnt our world really. Its like asking us to make it more like Mastodon or Hypercore, no, we made it this way in purpose and we have great reasons for it.

Regarding DHT scale, it used for dns records, and it is very fast and larger than any other decentralized network, so it is weird to be casting doubt from beneath its shadow, no? Yes, all networks hit scaling challenges, but this is why we designed Pubky to put the user in control, to allow for central service in a safer way.

Why do you think we are claiming something prior to our own brand? We literally list every single alternative in the post as well as explain exactly what we do differently and how we use Mainline.

We are just another group of people with our own ideas about how to fix the web, we dont really owe nostr anything, but we are happy to engage with interested users and devs. It is what it is.

You can only ever choose one or two protocols in your life, and that's it, you can never change again without becoming a traitor.

If someone made something cool outside of Nostr, how would you know?

So far, there are two reactions to Pubky in Nostr land:

1. This is cool, let me try it... nice! i am surfing the sovereign web with my own key! whats your roadmap?

2. Zomg just use nostr you tether shitcoiner this is just slashtags/nostr/keet rebranded i hate you i am going to marry nostr

Incentives are wild.

I dont even own a suit, this is silly guys...

Because it isnt, really. Slashtags was an attempt to build our vision using hypercore, we scrapped that design and made Pubky instead.

It took us 1 year to make Pubky. This is a the product of the hard work of a dedicated team trying to help users.

If you want to learn about new things, we have lots of info about what makes Pubky different, but we also understand people feel loyal to their social media protocols, and might prefer to discredit us.

Do not be scared to believe, and say, that you are the right man for the job.

Do not let people strip you of your confidence or tear you down with their insecurities, you have enough of your own doubts already!

Take your work and actions seriously, be responsible, be honest, seek the truth and wave to the haters in the rearview mirror.

Never, never, listen to someone who does not want the best for you... but recognize when a criticism is exactly that.

Well, surely you at least see the irony in placing yourself above the guy that thinks he is the right guy for the job.

Indeed, just consider that you can't really map the concept of a tyrant general or misguided leader onto an open-source web protocol team, so it may be more interesting to discuss the tech than my ego or fallibility.

We all have role models. We all have people we trust. We all need leaders.

All *humans* are subject to state violence.

There is no less risk for the core maintainers of a foss repo than to the c-level of a corp.

Both are fully open-source, both are dependent on a few sources of funding, both are led by corruptible killable humans.

Otherwise, I challenge you to find a more principled benevolent leader than myself.