One of the strange things to understand, which was not seen by many people until arrest of Telegram's CEO is the regulatory capture of big-social(tm). Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, etc. are not arrested by French cops, because they comply, at least with the governments that have hard power.

Imagine you run a platform for chat, or social media network and countries such as France, Uganda, Hungary, Ecuador, USA, Great Britain, constantly spam you with some weird requests. Unless you have a team of hundreds of people following some strange requests from countries you probably never heard of, you are "non-cooperating" and go to jail.

One way to solve this is to encrypt, another is to decentralize and don't run any infrastructure.

Signal is doing the encryption route. Want me to investigate this group? Sorry, I don't know what the group is, I don't even see its name. I don't know who's a member. No, I don't know what they are chatting about. I can't remove the content, because I don't know what content belongs to it.

Nostr is doing it the decentralization route. "Sorry, we are authors of the user interface, we do not store any messages, go talk to the relay operators, here's a list" (pastes a list of top 1000 relays, silently runs nostrsync to copy the content everywhere, so the police have more fun).

SimpleX and Keet are doing it both ways. In SimpleX case, relays can be run by anyone (and it's encrypted). In Keet, there are no relays, it's peer to peer.

It is not only about showing middle finger to the government (and in some cases, it might be just and good do cooperate), but it is also about avoiding regulatory capture by big-tech - you can cooperate easily by saying "sorry, not our infrastructure" or "sorry, we would like to tell you about this user/message, but we don't know anything about it, it's encrypted".

This regulatory capture is everywhere. Try to publish a simple app in the app stores and you will be constantly bombarded by e-mails such as "taxation in Uganda / India has changed, here's what you need to do". Really? I have a calculator app. 

 I wish nostr was like that, but in reality there's about 6ish big clients and 6ish big relays.  Some of the clients are also relay operators.

We have had over 1000 relays but the network was neglected and there has been an exodus.  The likely path is more centralization.

I reread this today, is still good.  I've yet to see any of the mainstream nostr devs that care about or will call out privacy.  I now more think of nostr as a useful social app protocol that obsoltes vendor lock-in.

https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html 

 Well, you can run Nostrsync and the content is distributed across a lot of relays. For this particular problem, it is not about "there are 6 big relays", if you want content deleted, you need it deleted everywhere, which is difficult to do.

If all of them were taken down, the network would not work well. But the other way is not so easy - if you want to take down a note, you need to take it away from all relays and with nostrsync, this is very hard to do.