Is it really true that Bluesky has better marketing than Nostr and is a better product than Nostr and that's why it has more users?
Or is only big like that because it has received consistent and relentless praise and free corporate media boostings since day one -- always, to this day, with a big picture of Jack on the side (even though Jack has never been much involved and then cut his ties with them completely) and the word "decentralized" in big letters (even though it isn't decentralized and can never be).
Sure, there are other factors, probably many others, but to ignore this part -- about which we don't have any control -- is not going to lead to a good understanding of our situation and of what we should do.
I don’t really understand this kind of criticism (and not to pick on Will here, it seems to be from ~everyone).
Bluesky took a different approach - first build a product people want whose technology supports decentralization, and add the features the geeks want later. It’s easy to shit on their lack of decentralization, but Bluesky has made clear and consistent progress on that front since day one, and I assume they will continue to do so.
The result has been a product that’s growing (those user stats are pretty realistic, doubly so when you look at the number of accounts actually posting real content) way more than nostr with tons of anti-centralization features that nostr is missing (anyone can create a feed algorithm, and there are many, decentralized content tagging is a really cool innovation - different “adult content” tagging services, opt-in different moderation services, etc).
The federated model of Mastodon led to a trainwreck of fiefdoms run by weirdly obsessive and controlling mods, but Bluesky took that and addressed the issues by splitting moderation from hosting.
Sure, Bluesky’s hosting model means you don’t get the relay-redundancy that sets nostr’s censorship resistance apart, but that’s not all that hard to add in the future (with the sync assumption they make making it easier to make efficient, too).
Building the kinds of stuff Bluesky has on nostr is gonna take a huge investment, we can’t leave folks like Will stuck building critical nostr apps by himself. View quoted note →
View quoted note →
