Hope they do but many may fear they'll start from nothing more than a server and no connections if Bluesky deems them dangerous for whatever reason.

Take the risk and self censor with Bluesky for access to more content, or build on nostr and allow total freedom knowing you'll be able to connect to at leased %90 of the more limited user base.  

 Bluesky’s separation of moderation from hosting does reduce the chance of that pretty substantially. Unlike mastodon, where everyone is constantly screaming for servers to block each other, users can opt to do so without the operator taking that decision. Sure, the operator could as well, but the fact that they don’t have to (even if they think the content is objectionable) is pretty important imo.

But the only thing that sets nostr apart here is that clients connect to multiple servers. That’s….a very simple feature to add to any social protocol? They could just add that and be done with it and then we’d have nothing. Not sure they will, but… 

 Not seeing why they have to. They could let the individual tusks decided for themselves deleting content illegal for them to host. They don't though. Then again is another beast where the users seem to want it. 🤷‍♀️ 

 Mike  and Fiatjaf are correct on DID.  Matt’s perspective needs some nuance. One of DID’s challenges is decentralizing the resolution layer so maybe pegging to sidechain might do the trick but I don't fancy tokens so not something I have a clear assessment of. DID can exist independently as long as it is retrieved together, both metadata and verification keys. 

But all of you big boys need to zoom out. 

** Firstly, Bluesky and Twitter today have become a reflection of the extreme polarization that plagues America - and that is incredibly sad. Nostr must remain non-partisan, enabling clients with footprints of Bluesky and Twitter, among many others in it - and it's up to people to pick relays and peek into different worlds within Nostr. . 

Until and unless Bluesky opens up a client for the right wing folks and anyone else, it remains centralized. There is no need to talk about “what if”. 

** Secondly, user adoption is key. Only thing to understand about Bluesky is that they knew who their target early adopters were and went for it. That's all we need to learn from them. 

Who are Nostr’s early adopters? Tech folks (and it's not the 3 to 4 of you here but millions out there), bitcoin folks, people who need censorship resistance (investigative journalists, people from challenging places), people who are curious and those who just want to see all the client devs here succeed. 

** Thirdly, listen to the users. Brazilian users were all here first but did not know how to find people who matched their interest. Then they left. I always see devs pissing on users for voicing out their problems instead of trying to understand the concerns. 

Privacy is needed for some people - and while Nostr can’t provide it atm, don’t forget about it - open it up to any devs who want to focus on it. 

**Fourthly - let your imagination run wild with Nostr use cases. Web5 was an incredibly simple and powerful decentralized platform but nobody understood the application side or impact of it globally. Man it breaks my heart to see it go but if there is anything you want to take away from it - start focusing on applications and use cases

** And lastly, one cannot just keep building stuff and then whining when nobody shows up. Builders have to go out there and start hustling for early adopters (i.e. figure out the persona of the target audience and creatively reach out). And then listen to them. Improve your product. And keep repeating the process - again and again until you hit your mainstream users.  





 

 Fair response, but I think you're not realizing how big this "relay" stuff can get. It's purpose is to download, store and serve ALL of the posts from a network that aims to be global, so we are talking about a lot of data (and a lot of connections to PDSes everywhere, one PDS for each human), so I think the only thing you can claim is that there will be 2 or 3 other companies running alternative "relays", like Cloudflare, Google and Amazon.

Even then it's hard to believe this will happen or that it would have a big impact because it would be mostly inconsequential -- 99% of the people will just use the default Bluesky (the company) relay, and if the Hunter Biden laptop is censored by the Bluesky relay, then the Cloudflare and the Google relay are also likely to censor it, right? Even if they don't, who is going to manually switch?

Or if some big influencer is banned from Bluesky then actually starts running their own "relay" for a huge cost, how many of the people who would otherwise be hearing from them would switch? How many people who followed Trump on Twitter joined TruthSocial in order to keep following him? 

 Yes, there will probably be only a few big world relays, just like there are only a few search engines. The difference is you can verify when relays are censoring which will incentivize them to be as neutral as possible, as long as there is one relay that is a good actor. It's actually very analogous to Bitcoin mining pools. Economics forces only a handful to exist, but as long as there is one transparent and fair option ( Ocean ), then the others can't collude as the switching cost is low due to the open nature of the protocol. It's the same with AppViews. This is all theoretical of course, time will tell. 

 How is this materially different for nostr relays? Sure, nostr clients connect to a few relays, improving censorship resistance greatly, but generally nostr relays are expected to have a large majority of all notes in the social context. 

 No, they are not. The entire idea of Nostr as a censorship-resistant thing was always that clients would connect directly to the original source of events as decided by the publisher, so if I follow you and you decide to publish only to relay.bitcoin.ninja then my client should connect to that server directly and fetch your notes. 

 Yea but in practice (a) clients mostly don’t, and for very good reason - probably you don’t want to leak your IP to everyone you follow and (b) the number of people with their own relay is very small, instead most users rely on some relay existing that will host everyone’s crap for free. 

 I guess if you ignore relative usage most clients in fact _do_ implement it (Coracle, Snort, Gossip, Highlighter, Habla, Yakihonne, Yana, Voyage). The ones that don't are in process of implementing it (Damus, Amethyst, Nostur, Nostrudel).

I'm pretty sure the reason why they didn't implement it in the first place wasn't because of any of these reasons, it was because of a misunderstanding of how Nostr was supposed to work, and also because they followed the example of my first client, which was badly designed and I left that relay part to sort out later because it wasn't clear to me how I was going to do it. Then later some people may have come up with reasons like IP leakage and whatnot to justify their poor initial choices (again, I take the blame for it).

In any case if we are talking about a Nostr in which clients _do not_ do the outbox model and just connect to a fixed set of big relays then I'll probably agree with you that Bluesky is better than Nostr. 

 On IP Leakage.  Fiatjaf’s actions speak for themselves. He quietely included analytics that share IP addresses with third parties, without consent, then promoted it prominently on the front page of the protocol area.  You can verify this yourself at https://nijump.me (warning: it includes spyware not found in the source). It’s concerning that other developers either ignored this or made light of it, instead of addressing the clear violation of trust. This behavior undermines  claims of caring about IP Leakage.



https://image.nostr.build/9fe474ffeb8f500c444f453f3aaf26c04e3c9794105d1014e1d1c3a8d4298c52.jpg 

 this is concerning