Oddbean

I might be wrong, but as I understand it, you don’t need to trust a relay. It’s just a messenger that brings you notes, and the notes are signed by the private key of the account who wrote it. I imagine it’s like PGP signed emails. The signature is what guarantees you that you’re reading the original and unaltered email and it does not matter how you received it. Please correct me if I’m wrong, #nostr experts.

I think the more important question is: how do you trust the nostr client you’re using? All those clients that you put your nsec in so you can post, can steal your profile and there’s nothing you can do about it. There is no password to change. Once they have your nsec key, they own your profile forever and can do anything with it.

Programmatically it makes total sense that relays cannot alter the content of events and resign it. Do they have control over distribution of the content? Are they able to censor it? One solution could be using multiple relays and not trusting a singular relay. Then my follow up question will be, is it possible to send a content to multiple relays simultaneously? #nostr

I am just guessing here, as I don’t know the insides and I am curious about these things too. I assume that censoring in a specific relay is perfectly possible as the notes are public and I relays can probably implement any kind of filter they want and decide which note to keep. About how notes get distributed around the nostr network, it’s a mystery to me. I think relays are not connected to each other, so I have no idea how it works. And finally: of course you can (and should for the reasons above) add multiple relays and your notes will be published on more than one. What I did in the beginning, was look at which relays users that I found interesting were using and add them to my client.