[numpad0]

Nostr sadly doesn't scale. IMO it's a better system for decentralized account identity lookup but not great for content delivery. It needs something else for the content part.

ATproto allows data to be hosted off-site but account lookup goes through the Bluesky owned centralized infra. Just my hunch but maybe its "federation" aims is just a sugarcoated version of "it's a carbon copy of late 2010s Twitter microservices, but we're building it on public IP with intentionally minimal authentication".

[api]

Hmmm... if Bluesky owns identity then it's just another centralized SaaS play which I guess is to be expected.

There is zero mechanism for the funding or promotion of anything that's not a lock-in play or a data play (or both).

I didn't realize Nostr had such scaling problems but I think it makes sense now that I consider how it's a client-server system with a network of servers. Making all traffic go through it that way is going to cause scaling issues or require scale-up of infrastructure that will break decentralization. AFAIK they intentionally passed on P2P because "it's hard," which is true, but it's also how you don't pay for bandwidth.

IPv6 has enough penetration now that you could probably get away with easy mode P2P where IPv6 is required. You still have to hole punch there but it works about 100% of the time because no port remapping. (Even the few areas where V6 NAT is deployed, it's usually 1:1 NAT without port remap.) If you don't have V6 you get a slower experience because you have to relay.

[rapnie]

All kinds of innovations of the network stack would be easier when IPv6 has that penetration. I saw a very cool vid by Brett Sheffield of Librecast [0] titled "Privacy and Decentralization with Multicast" [1] (btw, it is hosted on a decentralized PeerTube instance) and it was an eye-opener for me, as the average tech person not deeply into this stack and taking the one we have for granted (mostly).

[0] https://librecast.net

[1] https://spectra.video/w/9cBGzMceGAjVfw4eFV78D2

[api]

I've wondered if this might not be a reason for some of the slow rolling. It might reduce the all-important role of cloud and centralized services in facilitating connectivity, which is almost mandatory in IPv4 world due to the existence of symmetric NAT.

[rapnie]

Yes, I had the same feeling. There's still a massive amount of money sloshing around in cloud vendor market to ensure people remain glued to their services. And then there are a range of new technologies that are all like dark clouds threatening this digital cloud playground. Local-first, P2P networking, generic sync protocols, Wasm-everywhere, etc. where a paradigm shift in computing away from both cloud and web browser hegemony is possible, and these become optional choices instead of 'where it all happens'.

There's much more interesting innovation waiting for adoption on that lower part of the internet stack I suppose. As someone for whom that's a too specialist area I would love to have more overview of what are the promising technologies and upcoming standards to place early bets on.

The other day by accident I found out about Named Data Networking networking [0] via a paper [1] "Exploring the Design of Collaborative Applications via the Lens of NDN Workspace", and saw that NDN still sees active development after many years, so I wondered about the extent the technology still is considered promising for mass adoption today.

[0] https://named-data.net/

[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2407.15234v1

[pfraze]

Your referring to the ID registry (PLC) which is intended to be moved to a separate org.

[lifty]

Why doesn’t nostr scale?