Oddbean new post about login | logout Nostr is NOT censorship-resistant. That is just a marketing slogan. It is more like RAID. Instead of 1 hard drive you have 3. So if one drive dies, you can keep a relatively steady service without losing everything. If you are banned from the top 5 relays, you're not going to have a good time.
disagree. Anti-censorship You own your account data, not any client or relay. Even if all relays block you, you can still communicate with nsotr users through your own relay. If you are blocked by X, you cannot restore your account even if you are the president of the United States. Anti-censorship is to ensure users’ right to control their own accounts through protocol mechanisms.
It's only effective if your followers are on that relay. Otherwise, it's like talking to yourself with no one to listen. Correct me if I m wrong
resistant vs proof, big distinction many lawsuits over this one misunderstanding the difference is why it isn't "censorship-proof" and why it is extremely specious to say that shitcoin chains with 100 max nodes are anywhere near as censorship resistant as a protocol that doesn't have a consensus the consistency and partition resistance of nostr is entirely the product of relays pulling content from other relays or users pulling content from one relay and pushing it to others for private relays you don't want this, but it certainly could leak, that's an important thing to understand also... but on the other hand, a private relay could identify who had been served an event when and greatly narrow down a broadcasting user
Good distinction. Thanks. I think when normies see "censorship resistent" they think "censorship proof". I cant remember who but a prominent bitcoiner was on a podcast and said "damus can ban you". Ive not seen that tested, but I think if a damus user was banned from the damus relay there could be significant degredation of service, and if the top 3-5 I suspect there would be so many paper cuts that most would stop using the system.
I agree with your statement, in order to be resistant to censorship all clients should adopt the gossip model and each client should be his own relay. Although to encourage everyone to be their own relay we should solve problems such as dns, at the moment it could be all through tor but then customers who do not use tor could not access. There is a lot of work to do.
IMHO too late for that. But I personally think nostr is fine just the way it is. Better than a spof, which is a win.
If people can see censorship it's less effective because it breaks people's default level of trust. If a client filters someone, what else are they doing? Some people will move to a different, more transparent client. That's not possible on a centralized service.
dns is not the issue, not even a little, running servers from home is a solved problem, http tunneling is perfect, the real unavoidable problem is that maintaining servers suck and no one wants to do it. in fact the very idea of Nostr was based on that thesis as opposed to the p2p thesis.