Infrastructure is just a service provided. Reminds me of a baker in the UK who refused to bake a cake for a gay couple based on their religious beliefs which created a lot of discussion. Should they be compelled to provide their service or have a right to choose? I think the only way to truly separate infrastructure from ideology is if the infrastructure (i.e. relays) have no view of what they are relaying. It’s probably not just going to be ideology either. There will be legislative reasons. Again, for the UK I wouldn’t be surprised if some relays services feel compelled to not offer services to UK residents. And we should make sure there’s more than 1 baker in town :-)

“You Americans” always think it’s about you ;-) Maybe there are more than 1 gay cake? https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-32065233

Well, I’m glad to see you here anyway :-)

That’s where hashcash came from I believe and same principles here could be used here (using Bitcoin for relays rather than email) that it becomes uneconomical to post excessive spam. FYI @020f2d21…81a81c3e That works for encrypted DM type notes. Not sure about public stuff though if the relay remained in the dark about what it’s transmitting unless the message is sharded and that sounds complicated.

I think the idea that the PDS servers "should" be neutral is unrealistic. If community servers are acting as de-facto infrastructure and you suppose that they "should" do something, well then, there's always an implicit enforcement mechanism standing behind the word "should". If you still need to invoke a centralized authority to make the players in a supposedly decentralized system work together, well, back to square one then. I will admit I myself have fallen into this kind of wishful "should" thinking before. And I think the reason why it's so easy to fall into is because the early internet had a lot of self-selected people that naturally aligned idea on certain values like curiosity, not assuming things about people, etc. But it's a different game now. I do think nostr is closer to a workable solution than bluesky, because nostr is fundamentally oriented toward redundancy/exit, not consistency/consensus. Notice that biological systems mirror this architecture.

Hello and welcome!

Glad you made your way here. Looking forward to what you build

Welcome! Do you mind writing a long form about Bluesky vs Nostr from your own specific perspective? It would be really interesting!

If you're exploring Nostr, you'll be able to find people who share your interests here: https://following.space/

I've been working on a protocol design that could solve these issues. What I'm seeing in a lot of the critiques of social media infrastructure boils down to the power dynamics that emerge when infrastructure and community ideology are bundled, when the protocol layer and application layer are built together and are designed to depend on each other. Bluesky was designed FOR the communities on the "Blue" end of the spectrum (Western, liberal) as an alternative to centralized social media platforms that censor or allow infiltration by people with opposing ideologies, and the decisions on how the protocol layer works are colored by that initial intention. The goal was to create an alternative to Twitter, but not necessarily to address the underlying issue that plagues all of our social media options right now. Blacksky was explicit in trying to create a safe online space for the Black community, mitigating harms like racism. To do that, they built their own PDS, a custom Relay and custom feed generators. This tied the infrastructure design goals to the community the application was being designed for, meaning that the ideological purity is built into those deepest infrastructure layers. Nostr is much closer to the ideal, separating identity and message transmission away from any centralized authority. But the Achilles' heel is the same. Relays, like the PDS nodes of AT Protocol are volunteer silos with the node managers and hosts doing the work of deciding what to host, or giving up that kind of power and authority and letting it be a free for all without an economic incentive. Anyone can spin up a Nostr relay node and open it up to the world, or close it off to a specific set of users. I'm seeing a need to fill the incentive gap by creating a financial incentive at the storage layer that would guarantee neutrality, basically turning data storage into a utility service. This would allow community based applications to be built tapping into this storage layer and performing the ideological filtering and curation without the operator needing to feel the pressure to censor or gatekeep the storage infrastructure itself. They way this could happen is by using the metadata tags on the content itself, which would identify the creator, the topic, and whatever else the application being used is designed to add to the tag details. This would change the negative filter (I don't want XYZ) into a positive filter (I DO want ABC), without changing anything at the protocol layer itself.

I'll drop some links here that can help you with your research. For an overview of the Nostr ecosystem: https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr The following two links can help while checking out NIPs: https://nostr-nips.com/ https://nostrhub.io/ For tools (clients): https://nostrapps.com/ Also, for a list of 'big tech' alternatives on Nostr, check this out (click on each logo to reveal the respective competing clients): https://noalt.app/

Great, thank you. Fell free to ask if you need some guidance.

You mean avoid vibe coded stuff? Is the a better discovery tool he can use?

Same, man. Same 😢

Take a look at my book for a more philosphical take, https://building-nostr.coracle.social

A big part of these types of outcomes is also based on the community that forms around them. Bluesky ended up, for various reasons largely unrelated to its underlying protocol, being adopted by a very specific community, and that community views policing untoward speech as a core part of how social media should operate (not passing judgement on that here!). While the protocol design attempted to do that at a higher layer, the community’s strong stance on moderation and the developer’s need to fight urgent spam and moderation fires meant that protocol neutrality took a back seat. Once it was there, with a rapidly-growing community that viewed this as good, it wasn’t coming back.

The design of Bluesky was intended to allow for tribal portability such that a PSS banning you didn’t really matter, you’d just move your data and use a new one. AFAIU (and I don’t follow it closely really) that isn’t quite what has happened.