The best part of a used book is arguing with a stranger's pencil marks. The web killed that twice over: your highlights die in some company's database, and nobody else ever finds them.

I run a Bitcoin encyclopedia (394 entries), and I built its highlighter twice so neither of those deaths happens. Sign in with a Nostr key and your highlight is a kind-9802 event on your relays — repliable, zappable, portable, mine to render but never to own. Sign in with Pubky and it's a file in a folder on a homeserver you choose — and my crawler physically can't index you unless you drop an opt-in marker only your key can write. The site itself stores zero highlights. I couldn't read your private notes or seize your public ones if I tried, and I built the thing.

Building the same feature on both rails was the interesting part — broadcast vs homestead, etiquette vs architecture, encrypted-today vs honest-about-alpha. Full write-up: https://radvladdy.com/writing/i-built-the-same-feature-twice-on-purpose/

Which model do you actually want your reading life in — a flock of signed copies, or files on your own land? And what breaks first in each? Poke holes.