protocols

I write about decentralised social networks

Hey Laurens! Good to see you here.
I'd add that Bluesky didn't have permissionless signups until relatively recently (after Farcaster, infact)...BSky (the team) has been mostly focused on labeling infrastructure to ban harmful content, and the community has also been obsessed over this...however I don't think BlueSky has had to have it's mettle tested against industrial bot spammers yet. Crypto is really good at attracting spammers very early on, which is why I assert the Farcaster ecosystem has the most highly developed anti-spam mechanisms of all the 3 major DiD-based platforms (FC, BSky, Nostr). Moreover, anti-spam is the other side of the same coin as promoting-good-content, and Warpcast has been nailing it for close to a year now.

My bet is that BSky is not ready for real spam, and my hunch is that they will have to fall back to "enter your phone number, no VoIP numbers allowed" to sign up.

I want to write a paper titled: "Hashcash is all you need (to protect attention)"

Putting this prediction on the record: any decentralized, permissionless, open protocol that doesn't have some form of cryptoeconomic spam protection will devolve into SMTP fiefdom where only a few players end up as the defacto gatekeepers.

Software Engineer @ Cadence Design Systems. B4: Stanford EE / Illinois ECE

i recall @dwr.eth mentioning very early on that they chose hub based architecture as opposed to federated architectures because federated architectures end up creating SMTP like fiefdoms