You are confusing so many things. Read BEP0044 if you are interested. You can post signed arbitrary data to ~20 nodes in the DHT and people can read them later. This has nothing to do with pubky. This has existed for more than a decade. This same signed data can be sent in anyway that nostr events can, nostr events are not special in that way. But the data that follow BEP0044 are special because they have that extra ability. And by the way. Tons of nodes in China, don't take my word for it, run a node and crawl the dht and see how many nodes will have China ip addresses. Mainline is there. You can use it, or not, but at least know reality if you are invested enough in the topic to keep replying by this false dichotomy.

Not only is Nostr relays are orders of magnitudes fewer, and less time tested. and dns dependent. They are also not cheap to run AND have a conflict of interest since they double as service providers This is the Mastodon and even Email fault, where the service providers can boycott and censor other providers. But Mainline is cheap, extremely redundant and have no interest whatsoever in what is published on it. They don't compete with the services that are published on it. This is significant in my opinion, you can't dismiss all of this merely as difference of degree... at some point it becomes difference in kind.

"Don't trust, verify" is not the main value of Bitcoin, people were always willing to extend transitive trust ... what Bitcoin uniquely offered for the first time is dynamic membership of service providers "miners and full nodes". The primary risk isn't services stealing, it is services getting regulated. This is what is missing from all the "just use multisig bro" arguments against extending Bitcoin script to support sidesystems that are hard to destroy.

If you think bootstraping a social media is hard, wait to see how hard it is to bootstrap a DHT, for reference, Hyperswarm with all the funding they may ever need, still have less than 500 nodes after years and years. I would rather just extend mainline, at least to have some sybil resistance splash on me while bootstraping. But I also think the post quantum thing is the only reason why even bother, there has been no advancements on what mainline does, other than in papers, where you can say whatever you want. But in practice, all modern DHTs are inferior to Mainline, or at the very least have no advantage to offset orders of magnitude smaller network. And indeed there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that post quantum signatures are needed (different from encryption)... so i think we have at least 10 years to bootstrap this extension of Mainline... more likely we have until forever.

Nostr is in a weird place, because the Outbox model works thanks to the adhoc gossip that relies on coincidences to find user outbox relay... but that becomes harder when you give up on scale and start using hundreds of small relays. But even then, people will figure it out with off-protocol ways to find their friends relays. They funny part is that, if you give up on large worlds... then are you really getting much better experience than say Pkarr + Email? I claim no, Nostr api is clearly designed for search on big relays... if you give up on that, then might as well rethink the whole api and stack. Hell, I would rather create a DHT for Secp if the social graph is that irreplaceable... but then use a different backend and api that wasn't designed for the opposite situation we end up at. Gmail offers tons of free storage... we can do stuff with that.

Feeds still undefeated since RSS... everything else is just too expensive that guarantees the centralisation that Feeds just accept from the get go. Also, curators are good actually.

Let's be realistic here, there are only two ways to stay safe from the law; 1. No one knows where you are, in which case even if they take down your DNS. You create another and people follow you. But you stay out of jail. 2. There are too many law breakers. Bitcoin Miners for example use the second approach (pools are irrelevant as they are hot swappable). If your application is serving 100s of users instead of millions, and there are 100s of alternatives... you are practically unstoppable because the cost of prosecution is not worth it.

Don't be pathetic > Don't be evil.

There is nothing more evil than zionism https://www.instagram.com/reel/DMhuGcluj-A/?igsh=Y2gybjRjbTdnbGJn

Payments processors setting the rules for all downstream platforms, and Bitcoin is no where to help... shameful timeline.

I want a VPS humble bundle... multiple providers in multiple jurisdictions all for the same invoicing overhead. Who is building that? I would pay way more if they also make it feel like one VPS (replication, redundancy, and one of them acts as the proxy for others... someone please be a hero.

Great work. I think you misunderstood Bluesky though, it is much closer to Pubky, or rather Pubky is much closer to it, with the main differences being Pkarr vs PLC, and that Pubky homeservers don't sign data, but as you might be aware, almost all Atproto apps use the stream that does NOT contain signatures... which vindicated Pubky's design decision; if you have to trust an aggregator regardless because of scale, might as well ignore signatures and detect frauds by visiting the source of truth. Nostr on the contrary has no source of truth at all, bot even with the Outbox model because there is no consistent way to know where is the authoritative host... so in Nostr case signatures are not optional. I want to finally say that if you think of Nostr as small social networks, and if I were to design an alternative to that, as opposed to the requirement that Pubky was designed under (aggrrgatuon and indexing), I would definitely not only sign the data at client side but encrypt it too, just like Peergos does. But that simply wasn't an option, and to be frank Nostr didn't start with that goal either. I also want to note that in that small world paradigm, Pkarr aligns perfectly with storage incentives, just like DNS is aligned with websites hosting... because if you don't need aggregation, and if you are only querying data from 100s of friends, you all can use tens of small servers that cost nothing, ran by friends or free cloud hosting even, and migrate when they need to rug pull you. Anyways, I am glad that more and more people are giving up on the search engine global indexing goal and focusing on communities.