You can, in theory, generate a new key for every post if you want to. The relays don't care.
This is something Mastodon etc. lacks (accounts are tied to servers, so you can't move your self-hosted Mastodon to your self-hosted Akkomo without keeping Mastodon running, and you can't move from one instance to another if your instance admin doesn't let you).
On the other hand, the complete lack of account recovery, even for sysadmins, is something many people will have an issue with.
Your identity, BinaryIgor only exists in ycombinator, and for as long as ycombinator allows it, and only ycombinator can allow you to change your password. I can't recall how accounts are created here, but likely it also depends on linking it to your email identity as well. If ycombinator disappears, your identity goes down with it.
In any case, AFAICT it's possible to self-host every part of the ATproto stack, and people have indeed done that. Third-party PDSes, relays, and applications/clients can talk to one another and with the ones Bluesky PBC operates. That satisfies the meaning of “decentralized” as most people use it (at least as well as other federated protocols like ActivityPub and email satisfy it).
How did you register as BinaryIgor? You and ycombinator exchanged a pubkey. ycombinator registered theirs with a DNS register, while you threw yours away.
ycombinator has 100% ownership over your identity. There is no way to prove to me you are you without ycombinator.
Having ycombinator be your naming service is useful, and so any distributed system would be wise to re-implement an analog.
But what a supernet signing scheme offers is in addition to "forgot my password" it also has a "ycombinator disappeared / betrayed our trust" feature where your ID and messages exists outside ycombinator - as long as you remember your password.
What we're currently doing: throwing away our keys and let ycombinator resign our messages with theirs; is bad for the power balance between user and the admin.
However, the copywriting there is not in this vein at all. IMO the metaphor of personal websites is a simple, universal one that most people can understand. Nostr seems unintelligible to anyone that isn't pretty technical.
you don't even need to know how to host something on a server, the relays do that for you.
Can't monetize that.
Nostr is an apolitical communication commons. A simple standard that defines a scalable architecture of clients and servers that can be used to spread information freely. Not controlled by any corporation or government, anyone can build on Nostr and anyone can use it.
We already have a mix of technologies to achieve that effect. Sort of. Simplified, you can host a personal website on shared hosting, a VPS, or wherever, at the same time chat via IRC or XMPP, and use RSS to create feeds to share tidbits about yourself. Nothing stops you from combining different programs and services to get that.
So, what are the problems you're actually trying to solve here?
Do you want to improve accessibility, that is: lower the bar for non-technical people to join feeds, publish their own thoughts, join group chats,...?
Do you want to improve discoverability across what we already have? Make it easier for everyone to serendipitous finding information? Like, search, recommendations, linking, pub/sub, and so on?
Do you want to solve sustainability? Developing models that also cover the expenses involved i.e. either covering the costs in maintaining tech, or redistributing the costs?
Do you want to solve governance, the issue of providing enough affordances to communities to moderate/govern themselves?
These are big questions, and once you try to solve them together, you'll have to make trade-offs, inevitably. Decentralizing everything sounds great, but that has an impact on discoverability, as well as accessibility. Not having another account sounds great, but that hides complex debates about online and offline, distributed identities.
Even more so, if you dig deeper, our approach these affordances is based on our values. And those can be very different depending on who you talk to. That's where things enter the murky, ambiguous teritory of sociology, culture, and so on where few absolute truths are offered.
That doesn't mean we should just accept throw up hands and accept the status quo, though. Talking in terms of a single "network" or a single "protocol" is too crude to approach these questions. The intrinsic value the Internet offers us, can be found in a handful foundational design principles like standardization, composition, openness,... which allow us to create many networks that host many diverse communities. Each to their own isn't a bad thing as it's too naive to think that there's a catch-all solution that caters to everyone's needs. Balkanization, such as it is, becomes really problematic if it erodes common beliefs we hold about a free, open and accessible digital global network.
Many "technical" people who are active in these niches like Mastodon, Nostr, the Fediverse, or even the Smolweb, do so because they are steeped in a particular (counter)culture that espouses the same values that also led to the birth of the early Internet. Cyberspace really is a marketplace of ideas first. Technologies are an expression of that.
It's more that I like personal websites, from both an ownership and creative perspective. And so I wish there were more approaches which attempted to incentivize that model without creating a complicated new protocol, platform, etc. That might involve making it easier to create and self-host websites, an opt-in directory of personal sites with chat + forums attached, or something else like that.
Some modern day examples include: https://tilde.town/, https://tilde.club/ and https://sdf.org/.
But shell access doesn't appeal to non-tech users. It's the difference between engineering the electricity in your own house to become self-sufficient, and just expecting to magically get power when you plug a device in the socket.
Have there been any attempts to make more of a “network” that incentivizes operating personal websites but adds a mechanism for typical social media features like chat, a feed, etc. in a centralized way? The only thing I can think of is RSS, and that is only a way to follow content publication.