Oddbean

You're defeating your own argument here. Your thesis that bittorrent mainline is censorship-resistant because it verifiably has millions of nodes and 15 year track record, and something smaller is untested and experimental. Git also has 15 years track record and millions running the software. Something new is untested and experimental. As you keep pointing out we'll never get a chance to bootstrap such networks again.

Git is not a network though. And I wouldn't bother building an alternative to Git if I never faced a need that can't be satisfied by Git. So if the need never really came up, or if you then showed me how to satisfy it with just Git, I would do that. But the argument of networks should not be abused for non network stuff. For example, we gain nothing from interop with Oauth, when we are only authorising our apps to our homeservers, so inventing something simpler and more fit to our need than Oauth is the right decision, and it doesn't matter how old or tested Oauth is. Specific arguments are not universal dogma, they need context and judgment to apply to other situations. Regardless, even if we built our own sync system, it doesn't affect anyone who would rather ignore it. Some of their flows might suffer (like continous mirroring and backup), or it might not suffer because they use Git and they are satisfied with that, but as long they stick to Pkarr, HTTP, and the simple PUT,GET, DELETE apis, apps will just work. We are dedicated to the simplest setup necessary to achieve our goals, but not any more simpler. Worshipping simplicity too far result in sacrificing important features, like proper key management in Nostr. By definition managing Pubky keys is going to be more complex (spec wise) but offering nicer UX, and that is the balance.

and of course, when things are new and experimental, my tone pushing them on people will be appropriately humble. much more humble than when I talk about Pkarr. If I don't know that something is rock solid yet, I won't talk as if it is.

At the end of the day, Indexers will have a certain cost to run, and lowering that cost with complexity is a cost benefit analysis, do you want running Indexers to be cheap(er) and more competitive? and how much would you like to pay for that. And whatever happens, we will never expose any of this complexity to neither users nor light clients app devs, unless they go out of their way to leverage it. we haven't started with any of this anyway, but it is important to have plans for what seems as inevitable needs.