Nostr focusses on individuals and rights
So you have the Bluesky app which is high quality but the Bluesky network is entirely centralized
And you have a watertight Bluesky marketing program going VERY hard for a particular target audience
While #nostr isn't targetted
quoting
naddr1qq…ddegI was puzzled when Mike Masnick claimed that Bluesky is everything Jack wished for in a decentralized social network, being as it is highly centralized
I think the discrepancy comes down to different views of the role of decentralization encapsulated in this term, enshittification
“Even if most of the users of a decentralized system don’t know or care about the fact that it’s decentralized, the fact that the underlying protocol is that way and is set up such that others can build and provide services (algorithms, moderation services, interfaces, etc.) means that Bluesky itself has strong, built-in incentives to not enshittify the service.
In some ways, Bluesky is building in the natural antidote to the activist investors that so vexed Jack at Twitter. Bluesky can simply point out that going down the enshittification path of greater and greater user extraction/worsening service just opens up someone else to step in and provide a better competing service on the same protocol. Having it be on the same protocol removes the switching costs that centralized enshittified services rely on to keep users from leaving, allowing them to enshittify. The underlying protocol that Bluesky is built on is a kind of commitment device. The company (and, in large part, its CEO Jay) is going to face tremendous pressures to make Bluesky worse.
But by committing to an open protocol they’re building, it creates a world that makes it much harder to force the company down that path. That doesn’t mean there won’t still be difficult to impossible choices to make. Because there will be. But the protocol is still there.”
And echoed by Bluesky CEO Jay Graber
“There will always be free options, and we can’t enshittify the network with ads. This is where federation comes in. The fact that anyone can self-host and anyone can build on the software means that we’ll never be able to degrade the user experience in a way where people want to leave.”
It all comes down to this
“the protocol is still there”
In this view of decentralization, being there is sufficient
Decentralization is this thing that can happen if needed
It’s a safety valve operated by market forces
And where I think Jack and most of nostr would disagree is that market forces do not cater to the rights of individuals
Because one person being deplatformed is not a market demand
Especially for ATProto where decentralization is relatively expensive
To service deplatformed users would require building four servers, each one capable of ingesting the entire network: a Relay, a Labeller, an AppView and a Feed Generator
Decentralization by default is necessary for censorship resistance
Jack talked about censorship in the interview that formed the basis for Mike’s article
“I know it’s early, and Nostr is weird and hard to use, but if you truly believe in censorship resistance and free speech, you have to use the technologies that actually enable that, and defend your rights.”
https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mike-solana
Mike’s concerns over enshittification are highly valid
I would like to see Mike address Jack’s concern for censorship resistance
I think that would help understanding