Oddbean

How decentralized is Bluesky really? @Christine Lemmer-Webber has a great essay digging in to it and looking at the design decisions that make Bluesky work but also really hard to decentralize. Nostr is mentioned several times, we take the mantle of an actual decentralized network by making it work really well. Interestingly Primal is the best Nostr client ecosystem and they’ve also had to introduce centralization to make the experience work well. If you care about social media protocols and want to get in to some of the details about how then work, then read this essay. We can’t build Nostr effectively if we don’t understand what others are doing. https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

@jb55 yeah but we still have a bunch of fixes we need to do to a bunch more work so notifications work better, search, versioning profiles and lists, etc…. We’re getting there and can do it. But we do need to do the work.

Pienso que nostr funciona mejor justamente por que podemos decidir que experiencia queremos vivir con cada cliente. Por ejemplo para mi Damus es más genial que todos los demás. Pero los otros están igual de bien y son increíbles pero no para mi. 💜

This was a pretty interesting read, even for a lay person. I don't love Bluesky because I don't see what problem it solves other than functioning as a complicated Twitter clone. Nostr and Mastodon are trying to solve some problem, just doing it differently. They could have dropped all the aspirations of being federated and decentralized and would have had less headaches. Just be a really good Twitter clone.

At least one reasonable take about this bullshit according to which "PDSes are websites and Bluesky is Google". The most obvious error in the analogy is that on Bluesky no one connects to PDSes, while Google points visitors directly to each website's servers so they can continue having a relationship with those servers even after Google ceases to exist or bans those websites. The analogy would only work if Google had succeeded in implementing that plan they had some years ago for serving all websites from their own servers and that would be much faster if only all the websites implemented some HTML sub-standards they came up with.

The analogy also disregards the fact that in the current web people do not just use Google. There are dozens of other search engines, and people find websites through other websites, recommendations from people they know -- or, incredible!, people they follow on various social media platforms. But Bluesky doesn't care, it wants everything to go through the Bluesky central server. Even if you want to access a blog from someone you already know and have been following for years, you still will have to go ask Google to render that blog for you and everything you read will have to necessarily come directly from Google servers.

If this solution was proposed for the actual internet (to make it faster! and to prevent websites from disappearing! and prevent context from being missing! it would be super smooth!) then Hacker News and all the indie-tech people would entirely be against it -- but then when faced between that choice for social media (Bluesky) and Nostr they pick the first. I am sure this is all because of a big misunderstanding of what Nostr really is, but I have no idea of how to fix that.

Well we need to update how we talk about Nostr. @Ben Arc’s redesign of Nostr.com is a great step forward. We need to be intentional about the narrative we put out about Nostr. Tech gets adopted because of social reasons not just which technology is better.