Oddbean

If you made an account on reddit 2 years ago, even though reddit was heavily censored, I would have been confident you could message me and have me receive it. If you didn't want to make an account, I would have been confident you could find someone with an account, have them message me, and have me receive it. That wasn't censorship resistance, that was a heavily censored level of functionality on a long-zombified reddit years after Aaron Swartz died. Now I'm on nostr, where I do not suggest expecting messages to get through to me, especially on the mere first or second or third try. That is not less censored, it's more. The nostr protocol is designed to have the potential for censorship resistance. It's also a design that gets there very slowly, from what you can see today. Not there yet.

I'm speaking for the paranoid here, including myself. When posts aren't always going through correctly, saying "censorship resistance" makes the software issues and slow pace of improvement look extra sus.

How so? There are a thousand relays and 100 clients, many which you can run locally. No one controls anything. If you think media is centralized with a dozen providers then you can run your own server. Please provide examples to show your argument.

Using the same logic MySQL is also decentralized because anyone can run it’s own server. LOL FACT IS: like happened to email ux, most people now use only the biggest relay as the trusted relay, and he is an easy target to any agencies or even Google/aws/m$s can outcompete them. The truth is that jack wanted to capitalize over the plebs movements following the cyberhornet incapacity to deploy anything really good at speed needed by the customers. That’s why we “gave up” on #matrix in “favor” of damus (ops nostr) Question is: why he didn’t upgraded Twitter back then? Answer: because they wanted to countertrade us using the biggest sentiment platform at time. It’s not about the freedom of speak. It’s about keeping those with abilities under control (14 btc? Lol) Ps.: I never saw a brand new OSS without any relevance being displayed at so many “relevant”(btc) events, not even 1 #matrix stand at any event. Create the narrative —-> control the solutions 😘

Serious argument? It doesn’t sound technically accurate. Let me explain: if “all the world” MySQL servers had internet open doors you sure could query all databases in the same way it’s done with websocket (nostr). #nostr team seems unable to refute simple concepts. That’s keeping nostr very fragile and not resistant to any censorship. We’re being gamed.

No one is going to have an open relay at 0 cost. That’s why they block “spam”. Any server maintainer want to keep only his opinion-like-minded “good spam”. Neither MySQL, Mail or websocket (nostr) will relay anything without a pre-filter.

Uncensored queries, hell yeah brother Can't wait to be able to message my friends and have them get notifications though Remember the old days when cell phones were good? You could just call me and my phone would ring, that was cool But we've got uncensored queries, fuck yes

As I asked someone else in the replies - have you never noticed your feed loading inconsistently? Like, has every post always loaded instantly all at once for you? I don't get how you can act oblivious to this being an experimental platform with extra heavy filtering caused by not being finished developing into a public-ready product yet

Serious question (I'd like to understand your perspective) - how is Nostr being censored? (The only thing I can think of is each individual's "mute" list, but that's a personal choice...) Would welcome your thoughts....

Not always, but censorship resistance should include accessibility for both spammers and people who want to block spammers Every nostr client web app seems to use JavaScript and stuff to function on-device and take load off the server backend, so when I have the nprofile link, every client could by default load every post a spam bot has ever made if it has its own relay for the web app to connect to. That would be censorship-resistant Instead, even if it's a regular person instead of a bot, seeing all their posts might not work reliably across all apps. That's not censorship resistant

Nostr is censorship resistant because you can run your own relay and run your own client. If a relay or a client bans you, you're not gone or banned. You just pivot and you're back in business with little to zero downtime.

I don't see that as censorship resistant. Internet infrastructure the public paid for doesn't serve the public and telling members of the public they're on their own fixing it isn't magically an improvement. Nostr however has the potential in the future to bring infrastructure back to where it was at its peak and beyond, that will be censorship resistance

Flexible Fees and proof of work are the only true battle tested technologies against censorship. This websocket solutions (#nostr) looks like more #woke solutions. Benevolent dictatorship like Ethereum can work or not but has nothing to do with decentralization.

Using your same logic: blocking Ordinals, Inscriptions or any usage of #bitcoin to store anything besides #bitcoin value transactions is a SPAM and should be banned/censored/avoided. Well, that’s the zuckeberg logic, or any VC logic of the benevolent dictator. Jack was an example of benevolent dictator and what happened when the CIA want take back his control? He moved out! #nostr is heavily centralized into 3-5 very tiny servers. Very easy targets (individual server owner) and easily to outcompete by any competent tech company (Google has already said his intentions to run a nostr server). Web2 protocols seems to not work for dex but I appreciate all the work done for the screens on android and iPhone done by nostr but all solutions proposed here seems to be trying to lower the #bitcoin expectations by a lot.

Have you never noticed your feed loading inconsistently? I don't get it. When I tried nostr around a year ago my account got shadow banned hard on every relay people actually use. Banning me is the same as other platforms like reddit or whatever, but nostr is worse at this early stage because it's not even reliable to make a new account from a new IP address and device. Last time I tried onboarding someone to nostr face to face was earlier this year, we couldn't find a single web app that would actually let us message each other, new accounts can just be shadow banned by default. It's gotten to the level where it's starting to be worth using lately. Fiatjaf admitting the issues are there probably helped. But the nostr protocol and network both have a long way to go before there's serious censorship resistance. The current phase is making people aware of the issue and just barely starting to attract users to fully uncensored implementations of nostr so they can start to be functional. The goal is restoring the old internet culture where a sysadmin's job was to make sure humans can talk more than bots, not call power users "spammers"

I have never heard of a relay banning someone. Please provide examples? Feeds are inconsistent because relay response times are inconsistent and web sockets suck if you have a large amount of relays. You'd have a better experience with only 8 or so relays.

Changing between different relays and web apps didn't help on my shadow banned account. I suddenly stopped being able to send and receive messages and my posts became very rare to actually see loading anywhere after being posted. I don't feel like finding my account from a year ago and my old screenshots and stuff right now, and it has gotten better in the past year, so with my laziness and your hard work you're about to get some weaker more recent examples of it being hard to get text delivering consistently via nostr. 1. Yesterday I made a long form post and in Primal it linked to a Highlighter page that said "event not found" - so nevent link is not up to par with plain old DNS based link to habla.news which habla.news specifically told me not to use note1dfv2ayrau90ztv4peuu6jmy8k2mwd56aeya4vnn9w6373guvfhnspw0u30 2. The other day I made a post about a crazy strong WiFi network from a new npub for a bit of anonymity (breaking that now for this discussion) and it didn't show up in search results except from the app I posted it from when I wanted to go back from another new npub to reply with additional details. It now shows up in nostr.band just fine And a third example I just noticed - my njump.me page has out of date posts I'm often paranoid about being targeted but I don't think these examples are me being targeted like I felt a year ago. Some of it could be me messing up my relays on my own end and there's probably work being done by people other than me to fix it. Slowly. But this tech still hasn't reversed the decay of free speech quite yet

Thanks for the examples. This sounds like relay issues and client issues. Not censorship. Are you using the same relays on these clients and these npubs? Your different npubs need to have the same relays to communicate unless the client is using an Outbox model - many do not yet. I don't think Primal renders nevent or naddr events yet. Many clients don't.

Last time I configured relays I set nos.lol as my main one, and that one has seemed functional enough for now, so I haven't changed my settings, but I have been jumping around between different web apps on an old phone and not checking how each web app handles relays. I see it as real-world stress-testing. I should put it like this, what I see with nostr is some censorship resistance, and a lot of potential for censorship resistance, but not enough censorship resistance. People hype nostr's censorship resistance up like it's already hit one of these milestones when it hasn't yet: * Clearly matching the functionality of state of the art electronic communications * Clearly surpassing the rest, becoming the new state of the art in and of itself * Pushing the state of the art back to where it was at the peak of human technology, like when Aaron Swartz was still alive at least * Surpassing the most freedom of speech humans have ever had

I was wondering about that--if "too many" relays actually hurts performance...(I've been adding them as I discover more). What would be helpful 😉 is if there was a way to assess performance of a relay, and to see if it "deserved" to be on your list... "Relay Worthy" as it were (with apologies to Elaine Benes)... Or maybe that already exists somewhere?