Oddbean

#Pubky is Slashtags rebranded. Rebranding is never a good sign. Its the same group as the Keet guys. Fundamentally they are struggling with traction, their protocol is obtuse and difficult to build on. I get that having a bittorrent style DHT might be useful but the latency and discoverability issue is not gonna compete with nostr websockets. And there is a solid reason why SimpleX is using websockets and unidirectional pipelines for their chat servers. It just *Works* better. Not perfect p2p networks but for the purpose of social connectivity you gotta cut some edges off. Love the idea, but also felt like I wasted enough time looking at Keet/Kademila/Hypercore rebranded twice to Pear. Great marketing but underlying adoption will not happen at Nostr Speed. Nostr has its problems but its strength is that weekend warriors can contribute and for a scrappy distributed protocol this is what you want. Not $10 million dollar per VC app companies that refuse to hire american citizens and don't really welcome opensource part time contributors. You are gonna need all the hands you can get to build something anti-big tech and by removing as many complexity barriers as possible you can achieve it with max leverage, less labor and less time to generate the network effect for survival. #Nostr Will Survive. There are enough builders who don't need a PHD to make it work. That's the #1 key factor here.

You don't need a PhD to build on Nostr. That's fucking beautiful. nostr:nevent1qqs8rvvmpyn70l7lujutsaxhrg4jrgz2xtmvr49kx0heqz2ljv4lwugpzemhxue69uhkummnw3ex2mrfw3jhxtn0wfnj7q3q8pudjhdhhp2v8gxnkttt00um729nv93tuepjda2jrwn3eua5tf5sxpqqqqqqzeww6pd

FWIW - I tried to attend a Kademila conference at Stanford but they would not let me into their "closed door" meeting because I was not part of academia anymore. Anytime you have a "Closed door" group working on decentralized public good protocols, its really sus and contradictory.

Yes pubky uses Mainline in the same way Nostr uses ICANN rott DNS server. That is not p2p swarming etc, this is just a better DNS, the rest is HTTP And Holepunch team do NOT maintain any of this, Mainline DHT has 10s if not 100s of implementations

You need to attract human time and attention to gain adoption. Bitcoin frees time and attention. Nostr requires little to get started. nostr:nevent1qqs8rvvmpyn70l7lujutsaxhrg4jrgz2xtmvr49kx0heqz2ljv4lwugpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygpc0rv4mdac2np6p5aj66mmlxlj3vmpv2lxgvn025sm5uw08dz6dypsgqqqqqqsg3rtpz

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.

Pubky does NOT use anything from that stack. It is fair misunderstanding for historical reasons, but approach pubky with fresh eyes and you will find it an extremely light, performant and straightforward stack. We try so hard to be just as easy as using web api, just elevated to sovereignty without too many leaky abstractions. nostr:note1wxcekzf8ullale9chp6dwx3tyxsy5vhkc82tvvl0jqy4lyet7acstkurdn

I guarantee, you can understand Pubky and build a good application on top of it in a weekend, and get out of it underwhelmed too because it felt just like building a local web app with FetchAPI. But in reality you would have built a censorship resistant application with users having perfect credible exit by controlling who hosts their data and their URLs working transparently even if they migrated to other hosts.

i knew there was something suspect about pubky the name alone puts me off, personally... but if it's basically just rebranded keet then sorry #notsorry it's not going anywhere it also reminds me once again about how important auth and paid relays are for privacy on nostr, and getting messaging working will be a huge boon for adoption alby opening up signup is a big booster for nostr as well, because being able to streamline the key management and lightning in one little tool is critical for enabling payng for relays, which is critical for actual privacy... tooling to streamline deploying private relays like what cloudfodder does with relay.tools is also a big part of how we win nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzqwrcm9wm0wz5cwsd8vkkk7lehu5txctzhejrym64yxa8rnemgknfqythwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnswf5k6ctv9ehx2ap0qyghwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnhd9hx2tcqypcmrxcfylnllhlyhzu8f4c69vs6qj3j7mqafd3na7gqjhun90mhzl9nkff

I don’t disagree but if I wanted to be charitable they did say they rebranded from slashtags to pubky because of a trademark infringement lawsuit threat. Maybe that was only a piece and traction was the big motivator, but worth at least hearing out their side.