Here it is: "so a couple of thoughts on what fiatjaf is saying I’m gonna start with this: I don’t feel the same way about nostr or activitypub or most other projects. generally speaking, everybody is engaging in tradeoffs and optimizing for different things. which is a good thing I’m pretty confident in what we’re doing but I won’t pretend I’ve got it all sorted out. there are so many ways I’ve fallen on my face working on this stuff in the past. I have strong opinions but we’re all working in a difficult space the anger at us starting with a single instance, I don’t know what to tell you. it was either that or we kept cooking in private rather than testing the core of the software with real users. the absolute wrong move would be throwing the doors open on an incomplete protocol we’re working on the vibe control tech right now: curation and moderation. *that* is protocol. curation and moderation in a social network just is core protocol. you know it is because we all know the nightmare that would follow if we didn’t do that first you can open tcp sockets between a bunch of computers and say you’ve created a network but all you would get is noise and resource consumption—so we make things like atproto and nostr to structure the communication once those sockets are open the same applies to people if we just open connections between people and don’t structure how they communicate then it’s just going to be noise between them. people will be miserable. curation and moderation tools are core protocol as much as solving how things go over the wire now let’s talk about his thing about the BGS — the aggregators in the network — and whether those are sufficiently decentralized I agree: aggregator nodes have power. not a small amount. I once wrote a paper about the dynamics of power in social technology that was so pretentious that I’m ashamed to share it now but it was entirely about how authority models get embedded in technological systems and this is a really good example of that. authority pockets exist all over these things the problem is that if you view decentralization from the lens of removing authority entirely from the system then you’re asking for anarchy, which means no resource sharing and an overwhelming amount of pairwise relationship this is exactly what we were doing with secure scuttlebutt and while I am really proud of that project, I think it proves the upper limit of what can be accomplished if you refuse to entrust any authority in another entity. the answer is: very small scale and small scale interpersonal networking can be really nice for the right things but that’s not really what we at bluesky want from public broadcast social media. we want a global network. we want big world networking once you’ve accomplished that you can create small groups and communities within it — which is also wonderful, and greatly assisted if there’s a solid public backbone to connect them well for large scales the laws of physics just come into play. federated queries do not scale. you need high performance, high volume indexes that can satisfy queries about the state of the network. things like how many likes does this post according to hundreds of millions or even billions of users people who have worked in the ethereum world may be familiar with Infura. same exact thing. you’ve got an entire distributed VM on a blockchain with ethereum but the basic reality is that companies can’t afford to compute the whole dataset so they use infura instead so yeah, pockets of authority. what do you do about that? you lean on ways to check that power. external auditability. an open data network that allows competitors. a low friction to switching off the points of authority you also do your best to divest responsibilities from those potentially powerful entities one of the reasons it’s so important to have community driven curation and moderation is so that doesn’t get done by these powerful aggregators, because that becomes the mechanism of control over people what scares me personally is when a profit motive drives the decision about what’s good for people rather than people deciding what’s good for themselves. and everything that we’ve been building for this protocol is about making sure that the capital intensive systems don’t do that so these are the tradeoffs we made. this is the atproto system and the bluesky approach. and I’m sorry that the nostr folks don’t see eye to eye with us, but I really do hope they find success because it’s good to have more than one network in the world. because hey, I could be wrong”