I agree with most of this, but an important x factor is none of this is happening in isolation. On the atproto side the variety of clients is getting up there. It’s probably fair to say there’s now similar client variety on atproto as on nostr, plus there are some 'other stuff' clients there of a type nostr doesn’t have yet. There are just a lot of independent atproto devs right now, really buzzing, and night and day from last year. And there’s more funding. Also the cost to spin up an atproto full network relay is now down to around $30 per month. A full network relay is everything, every post, every reply, every reaction, from everyone, peaking at 2k events a second, and can be seen in the same terms as Primal’s cache relay. These relays are popping up around the world (blog linked below), and anyone can spin one up. There’s also been key movement on the identity side in recent months, which is a lot to sum up but TLDR things are getting more sovereign and not less over there. Basically atproto is becoming a little more nostr-like each month. Will that continue? Who knows. But if so it might mean nostr ought to focus more on what sets nostr apart regardless of how many steps atproto can shuffle in nostr's direction. Then you’ve got pubky with some good ideas like PKDNS, and legit claims to censorship resistance untied to DNS concerns. And Holepunch is doing it's thing. (But it’s really atproto that is not to be slept on.) I do think though that when you look at atproto and nostr there are some clear things that set nostr apart. It's just that the focus is perhaps less on those things right now. If more focus goes there I think nostr has quite a good chance still.

A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month | bryan newbold (✈️ vacation/travel through mid-Jan)

This is an update to a Summer 2024 blog post. At the time, atproto relays required a cache of the full network on local disk to validate data struc...