i was looking at nostr relay map on nostrudel nip-66 client and i saw lack of relays on middle east, where we really need to reach the vision of nostr and make the freedom speech possible for everyone. we know that there is a high possibility for these countries to lose their access to public internet as the government did this before for more than a week. i thought what if we run relays on local ips to at least keep the thing up internally for people.

but based on my current knowledge this is not possible since there is kyc on server providers everywhere and its easy to find the server and owner. the question here is what we can do in this situation? the best answer i reached is to keep relays separate, small and bought using different identities. and the most important one we need a way to change the form of envelopes.

last time this happened, wrote a simple messaging service and we used it with a limited number of friends. but for a bigger network im not sure how can we hide it!?!

also, there is some reports about irgfw which ill try to summarize it and share it in english here.

i think for this purpose chinese nostriches can help since i know they have a limited internet too and i can see they are running some relays. i would be happy if you know any of them and mention them here.

#asknostr #censorship #irgfw

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“last time this happened, wrote a simple messaging service and we used it with a limited number of friends. but for a bigger network im not sure how can we hide it!?!”

The beauty of decentralized protocol you can have many smaller relays each with limited number of friends. I remember seeing someone fire off a note only to his personal relay and no other relay, and everyone eventually still saw it through enough rebroadcasting.

yes, im thinking about something similar. small relays even temporary ones with small communities.

but then we need some efficient implementations of relays.

What’s inefficient about the current options?

by efficient i mean something with a super lightweight and simple configuration. sometimes with low resource usage and probably a way to be managed using a gui or something. then individuals can run random nodes over the country, make this more unstoppable.

Strfry: A highly efficient Nostr relay that uses LMDB for local storage, eliminating the need for external databases. It supports hot reloading of configurations, real-time streaming, and compression features for optimized performance.

Nostream: A feature-rich relay written in TypeScript with support for multiple NIPs, rate limiting, and monetization via the Lightning Network. It is configurable and resource-efficient.

Hornet Relay: Offers an all-in-one solution with a GUI dashboard for easy management. It supports standard Nostr notes and media portability through Blossom blobs

Nostpy GUI Client: Allows relay operators to manage relays (e.g., banning pubkeys, deleting events) without SSH access, using a user-friendly interface.

the last ones seem to be new and interesting...

new to me of course.

Between #nostr and #Bitcoin there’s too much innovation for any one person to keep up. Truly a blessing.

agreed.

Part of the problem is that the English language is used a lot in the protocol itself, and the protocol itself relies on HTML and JavaScript which are also coding languages that use the English language a lot.

Plenty of middle easterners know English, but systems making so much use of English might have a hard time convincing anyone they're decentralized and censorship-resistant; leaving no advantage against other centralized platforms with more users and content.

im not sure if this affects the process for people to come here. a new community can use its own language, that's the point. lack of content in different topics compared to other social medias is a good point, but im talking about times when we don't have any access to these social medias at all.

If your adversary is omniscient and omnipotent then there is not much hope, but I'll leave this question for more knowledgeable people.

Happy New Year jaf 🫂⚡️🧡

umm, they are stupid. thanks. 🪼

Was there a time in the history in which they cut out access to other countries completely but kept the internet working only inside?

yes. 2 years ago they limited internet to a local network. someone believe there was still access to outside, but i can sat most of people wasn't able to use public internet. not sure how much it took.