Oddbean

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.