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50 sats \ 14 replies \ @kepford 21 May \ on: Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet nostr
What do you think the odds are for Bluesky to do it?
Not great. They are marginally more open than X when it had an open API a decade ago and people were building custom clients. To scale, to justify the investment, it'll begin centralizing at the few margins where it currently isn't centralized, protecting their interests, so they can monetize.
Decentralization is primarily a marketing angle for them afaict; "no elon, no zuck here ... for now." Once they have a sufficient network effect, they'll transition their marketing to being about openness, then they won't bother with that either and attract people with the reach/scene.
In contrast to nostr, they are overpromising and doing great with the appearance of delivering. Nostr overpromises, and being more honest, underdelivers ... for now.
Toppling the existing social empires of network effects, and doing so in a way that's actually decentralized, will require a breakthrough we're yet to see imo.
I suspect nostr over time will turn into a de facto federation - every meaningful nostr app will have a Primal-like megarelay, holding a copy of most things on the network, and dealing with spam like SMTP does (this note is stored on this trusted relay, so I'll store it too). I know some people view that as fatal but I don't. The identity is portable so it'll likely produce unexpected novelty.
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If this type of filtering occurs, I understand that it is fine, you can use or not that client that filters the content of the relays. What I don't like are the federations, because it is a different way of centralizing something, even though this federation within Nostr is not an impediment to using other clients outside of this federation.
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Yes, it's absolutely not a perfect, one-to-one comparison with federated protocols. It's also not exactly peer-to-peer. It's something in the middle, something that we can't predict what emerges because it's new.
In some cases, like social media, it will effectively be a federation. In others, more P2P-like. What that means, and what utility that has, I don't know.
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Federations are far better than a single entity. The core issue is humans. I watched this all break down with Mastodon. I was a very early user of it and saw censorship and copy cats take over. This can and will happen to Nostr but at least Nostr doesn't centralize identity and it is easier to run a relay than a Mastodon instance.
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Yes, by default the same will not happen with Nostr as a whole. That's good, I like Nostr even though I know that massification is extremely difficult, I say this in agreement with what was said in this interview:
You have to be a bit more sophisticated as a user.
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My main issue with Nostr is how people use it. I don't get nearly as much value from it as I do from SN. Why? Because its seems to be used like Twitter which really is low value IMO. It has value but its far too much of a drive by experience for me.
I write long form stuff here and share it on Nostr almost every time. I get near zero response on Nostr. Nostr is just to low attention span for my taste.
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Short form has its place, especially at scale and in aggregate, where very good and concise information can rise to the top1.
It doesn't really gel with long form though. It's kind of like putting brisket in ice cream which makes a lot of sense to people that only eat ice cream, but is at best a novelty to people that like BBQ.
Footnotes
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If I were working on a short form nostr client, I'd spend 80% of my time on ML/AI ranking algos, because that's where all the low hanging fruit are. ↩
For this reason I stopped spending my time on nostr and have been focusing more here on SN. I still go there to take a look at what's going on, unfortunately the topics in my language don't appeal to me.
Its the same for bitcoin.
Bitcoin is fine, people have to discover it and understand it. A critical mass does at least. You can't just snap your fingers and change culture. Same goes for value for value vs. the ad model. The "free" model.
These things take time. Culture evolves.