They could try actually being decentralized per the original vision.
Discussion
Being decentralised does not give you diplomatic immunity.
The point is that nostr still works for users in that jurisdiction even if the relays or clientes there are temporarily down. Users in Mississippi can still use clients and relays not hosted in Mississipi.
Users in Mississippi can also still use ATProto via other clients that are not Bluesky. In both cases someone is doing something illegal, unless they are age checking.
Who would be doing something illegal?
According to the law the operator of any "website, application, program, or software" that "connects users in a manner that allows users to socially interact with other users on the digital service" and that does not make "commercially reasonable efforts to prevent or mitigate the exposure of minors to harmful material". So that covers all Nostr client, relay and blossom server operators
It doesn't matter where in the US or the world the operator is based. If in another country and the court in Mississippi finds the person in violation then that person will have fun on their next visit to the US.
So if a child decides to insert my french nostr relay link on Primal, Interpol will come for me?
How about if a smart 16-y old is just signing events and polling relays in his linux terminal without a client? Who goes to prison?
How many children in Mississippi are using this relay of yours? Is it well known? Are children sharing it in forums?
If your example is limited to just one inquisitive kid then I think we can both agree that you'll not be denied entry to the US.
Are we relying on the fact that the terminal as a client won't become mainstream? Why are some exceptions to the law acceptable but others not? Are all terminals now obliged to verifying age?
You can ask the same thing about chewing gum in Singapore or graffiti in Zurich or anything else. Law enforcement will always take scale, motivation and other things into account. These are silly what ifs.
They actually aren't if your argument is scale. There are 20000 active nostr users, likely less than 1000 of which are children and quite likely not more than 2 of those children live in Mississippi. So any Nostr client is in the clear.
Oh I agree there. I was writing in response to nostr back-patting vis a vis bluesky opting out of Mississippi. That back-patting is just as absurd in a world where nostr has no scale as it is in a world where nostr has big scale, though each for different reasons.
No, but it does force the state to do its stated job on an individual basis rather than infringe on rights of everyone in a group all at once
How’s that?. Unless you mean individual relays, clients and blossom servers.
Sure, it can mean that too.
Or any individual vibe coded client, self hosted relay or self hosted blossom server.
It makes it much more costly to enforce unilateral policies. Many more necks to choke.
But the law is still the law. And then we end up at what laws are and how they work in the first place.
The American founders recognized that enforcement is a huge part of the law, and encoded people’s rights to due process for a reason. These rights have been made into caricatures by modern centralized tech. Decentralized technologies have a chance to bring them back by adding cost to enforcement.
That's about protecting people who are accused of breaking a law but in fact are not breaking that law. In that case due process is essential, to give you the chance to exonerate yourself.
But if your explicit goal is to break a certain law, and you understand exactly what that certain law is and how you plan to break it, then that's another story. In that case I don't think the founders are going to be in your corner.
Do you think Bluesky users in Mississippi set out to break the law every day as they discuss things their particular state might not agree with?
The Founders put freedom of speech right at the fucking top of the list for a reason… they’re in my corner and probably rolling in their graves as “We the People” give power to suppress speech to the State.
Yes but again this isn't really about freedom of speech, just as it isn't really about due process.
The State of Mississippi made a law that says children cannot access certain platforms online. That's what happened here (and incidently limiting children's access to things was far more common in the time of the founders). Many people are happy with the law, many people are not. Those unhappy can talk about it all they like and make an effort to vote in new lawmakers who will repeal it. They might succeed, they might fail. Depends on public opinion. Pretty sure that's how the founders would see this one, as a simple case of split public opinion and the legislative process running itself through, nothing to do with some kind of due process or freedom of speech emergency.
That’s really the biggest disappointment with them. They started with a reasonable vision for scalable decentralized social media, and then built something and at every turn doubled down on centralization and took advantage of their privileged position to implement things easily rather than doing it the Right Way (tm).
There’s a lot of lessons there for many Bitcoin protocols…
There exist end-to-end ATprotocol implementations that touch no Bluesky infrastructure. It's nowhere near Nostr, but it's also not a centralisation pantomime villain.
I know, I’m disappointed in the Bluesky app decisions, mostly. They pitched it all about things being done at higher levels - systemwide bans even as lists that the client just downloads (and they even did this for some things!) but then once actually-controversial people started joining they threw that out and just said nope and banned their servers from touching those accounts (which has totally legal, if highly disagreeable, speech).
That all is true, and it's also true that while these banned people can set up accounts on other clients that use other relays and other app views they'd then be invisible to 99% of protocol users.
Zooming out though, these Mississipi-esque State laws are written to catch out anyone running any relevant infrastructure, including Nostr relays, Nostr clients, blossom servers, and whatever else. So all that can really be said is that Nostr tech makes it easier for Nostr tech operators to flout these laws.
Yea, I agree, in this specific case nostr isn’t immune, though the highly redundant nature of the protocol means you just need one, unlike Bluesky (not that they couldn’t pretty easily engineer for that if they wanted…)
Bluesky is the least of at protocol problems, eventually Mississippi will discover that they own and run the centralized PKI that can't be decentralised and will be ordered to nuke accounts from the network, not just from one app or server.
BSV? 😂