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> Up until the present date that same company made it difficult for anyone to run their own server, only permitting to self-host their own data rather than the promoted decentralized open data

> It also restricts anyone from adding their algorithms or even create new clients to access the data. It is a _defacto_ walled garden that somehow gets promoted on mainstream media

This is not remotely close to true and the verge article you picked was from the initial rollout of federation which was only 2 weeks after they got rid of invite codes and the service became public.

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Feed generators (aka the algorithm) are open. You can create your own feeds and their app literally has a UX for adding new feeds.

Labelling and Moderation services are also federated.

And data storage like you mentioned.

And the "firehose" (the event relays).

And even the app-view system/API services.

Oh and of course the Bluesky app's web, android, and iOS implementations are open sourced as well.

There are certainly some things they still control but that's because this project is still actively being developed to basic feature completeness. An example of that is the primary DID format used for defining accounts. The standard DNS record based DID format is federated by it's nature but ATProto's in house DID format is still limited to their instance until they can get it to a production state where they feel comfortable opening it up to federation (like they have every other aspect of their codebase so far).

I'm actually not sure how they could be more open about their push for federation. They want to relegate themselves to the position of developer and infrastructure maintainer as quickly as possible and their work has all been towards that effort.

They do need to disclose their corporate charter.

Is that really important in your opinion?

I can't remember the last time I saw a corporate charter that was more than vague corporate speak sounding grandiose and impactful while saying absolutely nothing.

It is more important in a public benefit corp, if there is supposed to be something different about them.

Legally there aren't many (any?) meaningful differences with a public benefit corp. Law changes in 2020 made it such that a PBC is more of a marketing thing than anything else in my opinion.

We've already seen the number of PBCs increase quite a bit since the law change, there was exactly 1 before 2020 if I'm not mistaken. I fully expect companies to start using it as virtue signaling, making the distinction effectively meaningless.

Excuses, excuses, excuses. NOSTR is literally doing all of that in the open with the community involved since the beginning, without a single excuse.

This isn't exactly a new thing. Walled garden companies will feed hope for years while dripping a bit of freedom as slowly as they possibly can get away with it. Reminds when google wanted to support XMPP, Microsoft stating they love Linux and more recently Meta now claiming they will support mastodon.

It isn't an open development, it isn't open data.

Just another VC-funded company with deep pockets for advertisements everywhere.

> It isn't an open development,

It is literally open development. There isn't a CLA and they accept patches/PRs from the community. The "least open" aspect is their contribution guidelines which are essentially just "the maintainer is not required to waste time on low quality PRs and reserves a right to veto PRs that move counter to the vision they have for the project".

If that's not open development then neither is Linux or Git.

> it isn't open data.

And how is it not open data? The data is literally self-hostable, the relays and API servers are self hostable. And you can choose between an in-progress ID standard and a DNS based DID standard.

There is literally no part of the data that isn't open.

Anyone can make a feed (algorithm). There are multiple independent projects that can access and put stuff on PDSes. There are lots of clients. They just added OAuth to make it easier for them.

https://docs.bsky.app/showcase

I have no idea where you got your information but you should treat that source as unreliable.

> "HN, it is time to make a stand if you want to keep the internet free."

That ship sailed long ago:(

Is this a Scuttlebot joke?

Agreed. Make a stand. Open and free internet is the last bastion. Look at everything. We're not the god damned product. We're not advertisement data. I'm not a fucking ROI. We're human beings, and we enjoy the internet, hacker culture. We're visionaries. We tinker. We build. We share.

Seeing what the internet grew to from the 90s to now, is ...well you see it.

It went from being a potentially infinite public creative/informational space to a privately owned strip mall with a few boring shops where you have to show your ID to get in. Same thing happens with any neat physical location too - gets commercialized to hell, becomes totally ruined and boring by last-movers, commandeered by academics who act like they invented it, and productized by capitalists who want to turn any/all freely available blessings into expensive yet shoddy products (plus ads).

What once presented a true and superior alternative to the mainstream firehose of advertising and propaganda became "Fox News Presents The Donald Trump's Presidential Campaign Show (Sponsored by SquareSpace), With Your Hosts Kim Kardashian and Jake Paul!" just like the radio, film, etc. - it gets commercialized/ruined.

We need a new thing, bsky aint it.

  >is a VC-funded corporate network that expects return on investment while saying it is open
  >Nostr

Do you mean the same Nostr that is backed by Jack Dorsey, the Twitter billionaire?

There is a difference between revenge-donations and VC-funded business.

One of them is pissed enough to break walled-gardens and that donation is now sponsoring multiple open source projects from small developers that even yourself can check in the open how they are used.

What is the VC corporate money sponsoring at that company? Right.

I tried skimming the docs, but couldn’t find how domain verification works on Nostr. Does a verified domain work as your handle or only as a verified domain?

That’s my favorite feature in Bluesky. I don’t need to worry about a handle since I can just use my domain.

Domain verification is NIP05, here is a tutorial: https://nostr.how/en/guides/get-verified

Basically create json file on your site at /.well-known/nostr.json

Place inside your username and the npub, done.

So instead of just using a domain TXT record you're required to host a page and provide access to this file? Seems worse than how AtProto handle's this.

That is a wrong assumption.

First: You can easily host a million user handles on a JSON file without impact on the website, you cannot host a million user handles as TXT record.

Second: It is far easier to update a JSON file on disk than using an API to a specific domain registrar provider and change TXT records there.

What are some popular user accounts on Nostr?

You can check that here: https://primal.net/explore/global/trending