Oddbean

His business is to get as many viewers as possible and spread the message of Bitcoin. By leaving the most popular platforms and deliberately cutting his numbers and the possibility of getting sponsorship, Nico’s business will suffer. If he were to do that, which he is not, because he is on Rumble. "Decentralization” is not a magic dust that you can add to anything to make it better, including chocolate cookies. Decentralization is a technique that is good for some things and not for others, like BitTorrent, Bitcoin and similar tools where adversaries are out to kill you. It is not an absolute requirement where good leadership is sufficient to protect users. “Decentralize all the things” is just Bitcoin Cult talk and of no help to anyone. Rumble is a good example of good services to solve problems. Rumble is better than YouTube and Vimeo because the man who runs it will not tolerate interference. Because video delivery requires massive storage and bandwidth, it is much more efficient to have a service with its own servers, rather than rely on people to keep and manage huge archives of copies of their content available for streaming, like the old Mojo Nation tried to do. The root of the problem is that the adversarial anti-Liberty State has a monopoly on violence. This is the problem that eventually will have to be faced. Durov being arrested may be the spark that triggers this. Nico and broadcasters like him can play a pivotal role in getting this message to many people, and he is doing a good job of it. Leaving an account with 250,000 people just to virtue signal about “Decentralization” is (as an example) super irrational. Those 250,000 users who look to the account holder for tips, tricks and guidance, not being on the new hip platform, are now left in the dark. It’s borderline unethical, and certainly irresponsible, and everybody loses. In this information war, reaching people is key, not virtue signaling to the cognoscenti. Redundancy at the platform level is the thing that is needed in the case of Simply Bitcoin, so that if YouTube cut Simply Bitcoin off for talking about Bitcoin (that’s coming for sure) then he can resort to his mirror channels and reach all his followers.. Because these threats are being unleashed rapidly, it may be the case that there is not enough time to replace the old distribution systems. Does this mean that people should not try? Obviously not. And in the long term, new tools may be developed to solve these problems. Should these techincal problems be solved, then the tools can be shared and…wait, what’s that? They have to be shared by people who control the distribution channels? Oh dear. If the distribution channels and the people who own them are also under draconian control, the tools to bootstrap any new system can be choked off. It’s a fundamental problem that will not go away by itself; and the exact nature of that problem is what needs to be identified and directly addressed. Bear in mind also, that the storage of files is a burden for the ordinary person. Max Kaiser’s archive of thousands of episodes was just lost as YouTube deleted his work. He doesn’t have the means or skill to keep a permanent service up to host his archive; that’s much better handled by YouTube or Rumble; its more efficient, more accessible and serves the purpose. The problem here again is the character of the people running YouTube, who do not care about freedom of speech, are not interested or don’t believe other people are real, and who destroy a decade of people’s work without an afterthought. If YouTube had been run by someone ethical, then Max’s body of work would not have been deleted. Its the same as burning down a library of books. Unconscionable and completely unethical. UGH!!

No one has a right to be served educational content in a YouTube feed without searching. It's not unethical for him to make his own content harder to access. Your 2 solutions is to make burner channels on YouTube, and to use rumble. If you keep making new YouTube channels as your banned, that's no better than nostr. You will never be able to grow too much before they find you again and re ban you. It's a permanent treadmill, and you need to keep a local archive of your content anyways which is what you said was too difficult. If you use rumble, you are still losing all the normie-discoverability of YouTube and not gaining much for it. Having a benevolent owner is not sustainable. He might have the money to sustain it now, but it's a money pit and at some point he's gonna have to stop burning money. If it ever grows to be relevant, it's gonna be stopped by either its corporate dependencies (AWS/cloudflare like with Parlor) or the government like is happening with the Telegram founder. Rumble might be 10x bigger than nostr but it's still tiny and will be shot down before it grows, even if the owner keeps it going. You need a system that doesn't lose momentum when it's dependencies are shot down. That's what nostr is focused on. Expecting a benevolent CEO to host your content forever for free is just naive.

You're offering Straw Man arguments, which is part of the very odd and delusional mentality of people who are breathless Nostr enthusiasts. "My" solution is not to use "burner accounts" it is to create an environment where people are free to offer services efficiently (server farms etc) and not to run from the problem by building things like Noster, that even if it worked, would not address and fix the persistent problem which is the power to detain people arbitrarily, the same way Durov has been detained. Having a normie CEO is very much sustainable and has been the norm for most of the history of the services on the Internets, and your "money pit" argument is just economic illiteracy. YouTube is profitable, in case you didn't know, and LiveLeak persisted for years before being sold. And the argument, "They're just going to stop it anyway" is the exact argument people use against new ideas, even PGP, "The government can get into anything, it cannot possibly be secure". Thankfully the people who know how things actually work are also the people taking the action to do things. That includes Nostr by the way, which may end up solving problems for some people, whilst leaving the problem of the violent thugs untouched. "Rumble is still small" is yet another fallacious objection. People react like this with nonsense when you "attack" their pet hobby, in this case Nostr. They put up stupid arguments, fallacies and gibberish trying to score points and "Gotchas". It's really very silly and tiresome. Once again thankfully there are many people working on this problem and as it was in the case of GPG, Bitcoin and GNU, it only takes a tiny handful of dedicated people to solve these big problems once and for all, and no one is persuaded by anon fallacies.

>You're offering Straw Man arguments, which is part of the very odd and delusional mentality of people who are breathless Nostr enthusiasts. Correct me if I'm misunderstanding your point. I wouldn't call myself a "nostr enthusiast". I just use it and plan on building something with it because I see it as the most likely to work going forward. >"My" solution is not to use "burner accounts" it is to create an environment where people are free to offer services efficiently (server farms etc) and not to run from the problem by building things like Noster, that even if it worked, would not address and fix the persistent problem which is the power to detain people arbitrarily, the same way Durov has been detained. What would that environment look like? I imagine it would involve either major political shifts or a protocol that can link together all the service providers and make them hot swappable from a user perspective. >Having a normie CEO is very much sustainable and has been the norm for most of the history of the services on the Internets, and your "money pit" argument is just economic illiteracy. YouTube is profitable, in case you didn't know, and LiveLeak persisted for years before being sold. YouTube was the main video platform for over a decade before it turned a profit. It only survived because it was bought by Google and they could afford to lose money on it for a long time. Look at all the alternates youtubers keep trying to build like Nebula and floatplane. They can't reach the efficiency of YouTube and they only exist because they charge money. Look up the costs of streaming video because it's the most expensive thing you can possibly offer for free on the internet. >And the argument, "They're just going to stop it anyway" is the exact argument people use against new ideas, even PGP, "The government can get into anything, it cannot possibly be secure". Thankfully the people who know how things actually work are also the people taking the action to do things. That includes Nostr by the way, which may end up solving problems for some people, whilst leaving the problem of the violent thugs untouched. This is where you misunderstand what I'm saying and I would appreciate if you understand. I'm not saying to be a defeatist about freedom, I'm saying we need something that has the capability of winning. It's great that there's lots of people providing services that increase freedom, but unless they are linked together, they don't create lasting progress past their own lifespan. If the rumble CEO burns through $1 billion hosting rumble for a decade and creates the most free and open platform in the process, increasing freedom for millions, that won't translate into much except a freedom culture when it finally goes away. The reason we need a protocol is that you can still have the same situation, but at the end you don't lose much progress. We are seeing it right now. Nostr relays are a money pit. They are selfless ventures that cost money to maintain. The difference is that even when all the free relays existing now shut down, people can start hosting their own notes, or pay a few pennies for a paid relay. Then all their followers and audience that they built up can keep watching/reading their content from the same app without a hitch. It carries the progress created by those relay operators into the future, even if they go broke or go to prison. >"Rumble is still small" is yet another fallacious objection. People react like this with nonsense when you "attack" their pet hobby, in this case Nostr. They put up stupid arguments, fallacies and gibberish trying to score points and "Gotchas". It's really very silly and tiresome. I have nothing against rumble. I use it and love their mission. I say they are small as a matter of fact. You can afford to sustain a small money pit. You can't do the same if it becomes YouTube. I think a so far implicit assertion I've been making might be our main point of disagreement. 1. I don't believe any freedom tech will be able to sustain itself with ads, especially if it involves streaming video. 2. Anything that costs money to consume content will never go mainstream and actually move the broader narrative. This is because you won't pay for something unless you already agree with it. If you disagree with either of those, please reply to them instead of anything else as everything else is a waste of time. >Once again thankfully there are many people working on this problem and as it was in the case of GPG, Bitcoin and GNU, it only takes a tiny handful of dedicated people to solve these big problems once and for all, and no one is persuaded by anon fallacies. I agree, all of those are technologies that are invented once and used going forward, building on the previous. PGP won't dissapear if they imprison the founder. Those are either technologies or protocols, not services. Rumble/telegram is more akin to Adam Back's Ecash. It was an amazing service that allowed anon payments over the internet, but it relied on a custodian bank and the government shut it down. We see the tech behind it used in some btc projects but the service died with the custodians. It didn't create any lasting change except the friends it inspired along the way (satoshi for example).