This is an unfair criticism, Bluesky requires you have a PDS before you even upload a profile picture let alone post. Mastodon is even worse. Yet both have millions of users.
Just because you want a community/friend to subsidize people onboarding doesn't mean that onboarding shouldn't be on full fledged encrypted filesystem owned by the user.
You may think this is a lot and unnecessary overhead, but only because you are YOLOing with keypairs, so it is ok to just post on a "community server" and call it different from just sign-up to a forum with email and password.
But if you want better Identity that requires a registration step, then you are going to subsidize something if only the registration, so gifting the user a few 100 megabytes of storage on something like Peergos while you are at it is not really a big deal, they can migrate to a better or self-hosted one later.
But I agree that any identity system that needs setup has to have subsidisation of onboarding built in in the protocol. And I believe I know how to do so, after I survived the Rootstock detour.
Nuh
npub1jv…s7yqz
2026-05-13 06:07:10 UTC
in reply to nevent1q…3vgg
Author Public Key
npub1jvxvaufrwtwj79s90n79fuxmm9pntk94rd8zwderdvqv4dcclnvs9s7yqzSeen on
wss://relay.primal.netPublished at
2026-05-13 06:07:10 UTCEvent JSON
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