I haven't looked too deeply into it yet, so I may be talking complete bullshit here, but so far my impression is that Pubky is 3 things: 1. signed entries published on a DHT that associate a pubkey with an HTTP server 2. HTTP servers that can host any file 3. a superstructure for reading content from these HTTP servers and turning them into a global social network It's a very elegant structure that sound very compelling to me, but ultimately I don't see how it improves much upon anything Nostr has, and it has significant downsides and unsolved (hidden) problems that Nostr either solves or is trying to solve right now. 2 is cool, but not a very hard problem to solve once you have a way to find these user servers (and, also importantly, someone to host these servers mostly for free). Blossom is doing a similar job with files as first-class citizens. 2 is also not very useful by itself. To make a social network you need a way to efficiently pull content from user servers and display them to users. There is where they came up with 3, which sounds very similar to Bluesky's central big server which they call "Relay". It's a centralized system that cannot possibly become decentralized. It looks like Pubky has accepted that as the only way to do things, and they seem to be planning on hosting one such big server. 1 is trying to be the most decentralized, censorship-resistant system ever for putting out information about public keys -- and we may discuss if it achieves that or not (I am personally very skeptical that DHTs can scale, even though nostr:npub1jvxvaufrwtwj79s90n79fuxmm9pntk94rd8zwderdvqv4dcclnvs9s7yqzis going to boldly claim that this is not a topic worth discussing because "Mainline has already proven itself with its bazillion nodes and centuries of existence" truth remains that Torrents do not work without trackers, and no one knows what will happen with the DHT if it has to store billions of records from people all over the world --

Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

P2P and federated protocols converge toward becoming Nostr, but with extra steps

is one scenario), but all of this mega-decentralization is completely useless if you don't have a decentralized way to load content from people you follow and have to rely on a giant central server hosted by one big corporation. Pubky's idea seems to be that centralization on content distribution is unavoidable, so they aren't even trying. The idea of Nostr is that such thing isn't unavoidable, so we are trying.

Thank you so much friend, I knew I could count on your experience 🫂🎨

Also the people at pubky are really sensitive and kinda sussy

> Pubky's idea seems to be that centralization content distribution is unavoidable, so they aren't even trying. The idea of Nostr is that such thing isn't unavoidable, so we are trying. This is a fair assessment, though some nuances are worth highlighting. Firstly, indexer centralization primarily becomes necessary in Pubky if your application requires a comprehensive, network-wide view of all homeservers—this is in fact something essential for pubky.app’s social functionalities. Features like search, semantic social graph inferences, and others inherently demand centralization due to the resource intensity of crawling the entire Pubky ecosystem, much like Google indexing the internet. I'm not uptodate on Nostr developments, but I believe it might face similar challenges in this regard, although I may stand corrected. Importantly, an indexer in Pubky doesn’t necessarily need to handle content distribution; it only needs to guide users to content locations. The verification of content provenance still happens at the homeserver level. Indexers cloning data and serving directly, however, can enhance user experience by improving responsiveness, and I anticipate the emergence of both lightweight and full-content indexers. We are building Pubky Nexus, a full-content indexer, but it can be strip down to become lightweight as well. We envision multiple competing indexers evolving, akin to the variety seen in web search engines today, despite Google’s dominance. While fully decentralized content distribution may have limitations, I envision (and want to dedicate effort to it) niche users with sufficient resources and interests could potentially run their own indexers, though they naturally only index a partial view of the network. For what is worth, I would like to run one at home.

@Vitor Pamplona any chance of getting collapsible threads in comments? Reddit may have turned into a censorious hell hole, but their original comment thread ux was the pinnacle of web design. It's such a shame that almost no one else has copied it.