Oddbean

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?