As for funding, if you don't believe central funding is okay for open source, I don't think you can believe in open source at all.

Open source is interesting because it can transcend ownership and source, that is the point, right?

That said, people have no idea how much freedom we have in our roadmap. I get literally zero requests from our funders. We are effectively a lab until one of our products justifies monetization.

The business model is first to build everything, then to worry about monetization. The likely path is simply be providing great Pubky apps and connect them with paid hosting and services from us. We can have cloud, ecommerce hosting, ai premium features, etc.

Tether isnt concerned with our revenue, they are concerned with us finishing what we started.

Also, it has become very clear that our research and tech can be graduated into Tether's own products and partners, so the value to them is already there. We are making amazing wallet tech you will start seeing everywhere eventually.

If Tether ever tried to control me or the team, it would just result in me quitting and doing my work somewhere else. More importantly, Paolo would never do that to me, he is awesome.

As for collaboration, I can't tell you what it looks like until people try! So far what's happened is we funded a few side projects for interested people, but we haven't has lots of contribution. Expect a rational approach: I would love for other people to contribute amazing things, I would hate for people to submit dumb things 😉 .

I won't force PIPs until it emerges organically. In Nostr's case, I think they arent exactly a great example of success. Even in Bitcoin the BIP process is awkward.

In the end, I am just a guy with a vision for helping the world through systems design, and I was lucky enough to find people to fund it. Very simple idea. Any other accusations are purely unfounded paranoia, as my reputation already shows who I am and what my values are.

We are all concerned about centralization, that's why we build what we build. However, I worry more about systems that pretend to be decentralized while baking it into the design itself.

Every project starts with concentrated funding, concentrated builders, and concentrated momentum. That is just bootstrapping. None of that becomes meaningfully diverse before there are many real users, real operators, and real reasons for others to build.

For example, Nostr will concentrate to a few corporate nodes at scale, and it is primarily funded by Dorsey and Odell.

Diversity is a product of competition, not loyalty.

The question is whether the architecture preserves that concentration or makes it possible to escape over time.

That is exactly what Pubky is trying to solve. The web needs centralized providers, so we use a system that commoditizes them down to cloud providers. If you are censored while using central systems, you can leave without losing your followers, content, etc. No other system does what we do with identity, semantic social graphing, and coordination.

Nostr, by contrast, has some centralization problems that are not just early-stage accidents, but consequences of the design itself. If it grows to scale, all of its promises collapse.

Honestly, it's a tragedy the Nostr got Bitcoiner attention first, because they are too loyal to acknowledge something better now.

I will answer your other questions separately.

Please be more specific, I do not understand your question.

Any terms that seem weird in our app ToS are there as boilerplate, we don't inject special weird things into our terms, we just ask our lawyers to make sure we are doing what is required.

You will find the same terms in other similar apps, and if you don't it is probably just amatuers.

If someone ever finds anything in our ToS we can remove, I am happy to check with legal about removing it.

We dont want anything to do with laws, regulations, or your personal shit, but we can't legally produce things without proper terms.

Pubky is the best Nostr 2.0 you could ask for.

We cover literally everything in a comprehensive way.

It's not easy to see that from a nostr lens, and because we aren't done building yet, but Pubky is strictly an improvement to Nostr in every way.

I can't really explain this to people with nostr bias anymore, so we will just show you.

I really wish things were different, but nostr people are impossible to convince of anything that doesnt come from within.

If you are reading this, know that EVERY SINGLE excuse nostr people make about Pubky is bullshit, and you can ask me or my team any questions directly if you want real answers.

We can't standardize the keychain until we are done modifying it.

Right now, we are working on amazing noise-key delegation capabilities.

fwiw i don't really believe that "standards" and "specs" are the same thing.

What is standard is what people actually use, so we can't establish a standard until more people use it.

In the end, if any dev wants to build with Pubky, we will assist them, and if we break anything we will provide them with the same solutions we need ourselves.

It's all open source and tons of work to do this right.

Don't let excuses scare you. It's Nostr 2.0, and you are missing out.