Nostr and ATProto (2024)

Summary

This post could’ve been titled “Nostr vs ATProto”, but that really isn’t what I wanted to do here. While I will be comparing and contrasting them a lot, and that’s kind of even the point of writing this, I didn’t want to really pit the two against each other at all, and especially not with the title. I also want to try avoiding commenting on the differences between the communities that have formed on the protocols and their apps, although I definitely will be looking at the philosophical differences between the two a lot - also kind of the point of writing this. This also isn’t a super deep technical post, though it assumes familiarity with technical concepts. I also might come back to edit parts of it and add more later. You can read and leave comments on this post here on Bluesky, or here on Nostr, or even here on Mastodon. So I wrote a paragraph mostly about what this post isn’t about, with a little bit about what I will talk about in it, but I haven’t really explained what this post is, or why I’m writing it. Honestly, I’m not completely sure of the first one yet either; I’m figuring that out as I write it. The paragraph at the top are really serving as guidelines for myself as I write this. However, I can explain how this post came to be. It started with a showerthought (I was literally in the shower) about how similar ATProto and Nostr really are. This thought came to me after ruminating on ATProto Relays and Nostr Relays, and thinking about how my favorite feature of Nostr Relays (spoiler: it’s filtering) could be added to ATProto Relays, and why you would want to do that. More broadly, this made me think that the two protocols are similar enough that they are likely to slowly converge over time as they learn from each other. A direct result of those thoughts (after getting out of the shower, of course) was to search the internet for a good comparison of Nostr and ATProto. A direct result of my failure to find any was this Bluesky skoot (There’s a lot of good...