Technical Debt on Nostr: I see where you are coming from and that may be true for some of these projects, like ...

I see where you are coming from and that may be true for some of these projects, like Yggdrasil really started as a research thing.

However I don’t think that applies to CJDNS and FIPS.

Caleb James DeLisle (npub1mh5…233h) , the creator of CJDNS, the oldest of this category of self arranging, encrypted, ipv6-compatible mesh networks (or darknets or whatever people like to call them), created pkt.cash with a novel “bandwidth pow” to, among other things, fund the project in a way that the equipment you buy to mine later becomes useful to sustain the network.

FIPS is the other way around, people at toll gate hit some scaling issues trying to bend the traditional network stack into incentivized mesh networks and so FIPS was born.

And there’s also Althea doing moves since 2018.


Now, I’m not so sure these projects are in the exact same position as nostr. Incentivized meshnets can lure anyone in with the idea of reselling idle internet links, which basically acts as the gateway drug. That is value delivered in the short term and dare I say it is easier to flash some random wifi router than it is to figure out how and why to nostr.

Meanwhile, when nostr (as a twitter replacement) got its big push, the fediverse/bluesky bridges weren’t up yet so people got burned with the lack of content and whatever other problems of early technology.

I’m pretty sure things would’ve been different if bridges were a day one priority, see how Matrix did an embrace, extend and extinguish on IRC.