Synonym was founded roughly 4.5 years ago, before Nostr existed, with a vision & designs for a (bitcoin) key-based identity solution, which we openly shared with many (some nostr) people, including interesting ways you could make use & make something like (nostr) this way. (Keybase was also before many of us fwiw)
Decentralized, key-based web & identity solutions have always been part of Synonym's "atomic economy" ecosystem vision.
(...Side note: some aspects of the upcoming Pubky App, related to Semantic Social Graphs, social tagging, being your own algorithm, etc, come from designs I have had for more than 12(?) years...)
At first, we attempted to map this vision & requirements onto the Hypercore(Holepunch/Pear) system. Synonym had just become part of the Tether & Bitfinex family, and the hyper features and demos were amazing. That project was called Slashtags, and while we demonstrated more interesting use cases, people were already opting to make similar features within Nostr apps, which had some nice attention-grabbing events and gaining big momentum, while we were still doing R&D and realizing that Hypercore was overkill for our actual requirements, and this was also when Synonym started enforcing a policy of not having experimental (non-production-ready) dependencies from external teams.
If it is risky and novel, we need to be the ones building it. Nothing else is good enough... (until it is obviously good enough, in production.)
We eventually clarified our identity & web requirements and began new research on the simplest way to achieve our goals and design.
We entirely archived Slashtags as a project, which had trademark issues anyway, and began specifying, and building what is now Pubky Core, along with the upcoming Pubky App.
This work includes PKARR and the concept of using Mainline DHT as the primary routing network for self-sovereign keys as domains.
This work was also shared openly and directly with Nostr people roughly a year ago, but was rejected then, and also newly rejected directly when we formally released everything in Pubky Core recently.
These releases and plans represent major milestones in a long-term vision and plan for Synonym to create our vision for a minimum set of software and services for people to opt out of dependency on Big Banks, Big Tech, and Big States.
The Atomic Economy is an actual vision and plan for a functional independent digital ecosystem, economy, and society. Yeah, it's crazy, overly ambitious, naive, etc, but we have been given this opportunity and you can be damned sure I will make the most of it.
Sometimes we have had to mutate and discard our research, but it has made our team and public releases much better for having the experience.
So, we offer Pubky as the next major puzzle piece in our vision, and really the most important part, but we have so much more work to do, and so many more ways we intend to demonstrate the elegance and power of being so selective with our designs.
Stay tuned to see how well we do, or enjoy ignore us and enjoy Nostr and its current path! Or, get your hands dirty and consider trying getting your own key domain working, and consider what you can build from there! ;)
nostr:note1qx5uqnzz7l0pdaprpxsvqw4t4ssqkjwcs3nwmpm95jmm0rxtpv9qjac4fs
I hear some bitcoiners say that using a DHT for this type of application is a terrible idea. Can you comment on that?
I would like to know their points
They are probably confused and think that we are storing actual data on the DHT, that would be terrible idea indeed, we are just storing very small, temporary and highly cached pointers to where the user's data is actually stored (on web servers).
“Sometimes we have had to mutate and discard our research, but it has made our team and public releases much better for having the experience.”
That reminded me of this recent screenshot I recently took….
https://m.primal.net/Lytr.jpg
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