Yes, exactly. The original article linked on this HN thread mentions Nostr and how Bluesky compares to it. I don't believe either protocol has landed a fix for

Yes, exactly. The original article linked on this HN thread mentions Nostr and how Bluesky compares to it. I don't believe either protocol has landed a fix for social media yet, let me explain. Social media posts are at the most simple level a blog post without a title field. Messages are written by an author, they are given a timestamp, and they contain some kind of content. To create a distributed social media product, we need authored posts with timestamps. Now one big problem with distributed blogs is authors go back and modify their content in all kinds of ways after the fact. How many times have you been to a blog where they've taken off the timestamps so that their most popular post doesn't appear to be from 2010, for example. Secure-Scuttlebot tried to solve this issue by using ed25519 signing key cryptography to create append-only logs of content. This is great, and as acknowledged in the Nostr original readme, it might ultimately be better than Nostr. But append-only logs syncing from post 0 until 1000 leads to UX-level problems for new users, which can be overcome with the right dev team. Nostr uses the same cryptography as Bitcoin, and has no association between the posts. This means you send a request for a pubkey to a relay and the relay sends you some stuff authored by that pubkey. It's kind of up to the relay what it sends. I've experienced UX issues with Nostr clients where I am being blasted 10,000 messages by a relay to my client just so I can render a thread. This probably can be fixed, but it would help if there was some kind of protocol level ordering to/relationship with the posts. But Bluesky managed to make it so identities do not really exist outside of your PDS. The PDSes hold onto your private keys for you, and until there is an option to sign your own messages your posts and your identity do not really exist outside of a PDS. The Bluesky PDS has authority over you, and then if you switch to another PDS the Bluesky PDS still has authority over you because they can still decide not to show your posts to mainline Bluesky people. For those of us who got into distributed social media because some anonymous server-side admin 'took action' against our account without getting in touch to correct the behavior first, Bluesky begins to raise all kinds of red flags with the way they've made it hard to separate yourself from the moderation team. Really Bluesky has redeveloped a very similar problem to the criticisms the original Nostr readme had about Mastodon. And don't get me started about Truth Social, which is what happens when you have a Mastodon PDS that does not talk to other Mastodon PDSes! It's not too late to fix these issues of course. I mean the PDS has your keys, so you can always rewrite the whole network! If there's anything I'd like to encourage Bluesky commenters to do is to keep speaking about how to solve this social media issue in a way that allows a global conversation, and also lets people not see content that they have reasons to not want to see. I'm happy to discuss this forever, for you social media dorks out there. Call me/email me/etc.