The last few days I've not had any good feelings about nostr, and I've considered what else I could do with my life. Seriously. Today I just muted the main problem. Hopefully my mojo comes back.

If you want privacy, use tor. If you don't use tor and you wanted privacy, then you are an idiot. If you insist that people need to worry about relays seeing your IP address, you are lost in the frickin' weeds and I can't help you and I can't pander to your delusions any longer. If you don't have an IP address, you can't be on the Internet. It is a layer we cannot be bothered with. I spent time building things for this half-ass privacy perspective that I don't even believe in (user controls of which relays to connect to) and I'm sick of pandering to it. It's a dumb perspective. So are VPNs (you can't possibly trust a VPN provider, it is an architecture with an impossible trust model). I've got more important things to do than argue this shit, much less build for this half-ass privacy mindset. Use tor ffs. Or use a half-ass VPN solution. Or just accept that nothing you do on nostr is really very private, like I do. Or go build a client relay.

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Solidy past shock, disbelief and now in the acceptance phase all around. Cheers to your thoughts.

I hate muting people. It feels wrong. But if I can't maintain my positive perspective, if people just aren't hearing me and are making specious arguments, I think I have to do it. Either that or I find a job in town and do something else with my life that doesn't make me feel so shitty about everything.

We're in the hard part now. Hang in there and stick with the winners. You have a ton of value and humanity needs what you have.

This makes perfect sense. 👊🫂⚡️

Excellent observations (and advice)!

Build things for yourself ...

Just be a little less degenerate than the average person and then don't worry about privacy. If they're gonna spy on you outside jail or make your life miserable trying to hide stuff you shouldn't have to then you're basically in jail anyway so who cares.

It may console you to remember those are not simple issues to understand. Ask any vendor who deals with public how many idiots he has to put with everyday, even about much simpler issues.

I did CS, and I don't have time to understand every new tech, or learn all tools.

Just recently I learned TOR is easy to use by setting a proxy, all is ready and packaged, and you only have to up 2 deamons. And this only beacause I cliked on an article explaining it, purely by luck.

Who doesn't want the perfect app who solves all possible real and imaginary issues over the whole network protocol stack with one click?

I had poor sleep and was very very grumpy. Seriously I was actling like a baby that needed a nap and I didn't quite realize that my motivation was mostly due to my physical state, and not the discussion I was having.

But while I'm back to replying to these notes I will add this: Tor proxy via a daemon is dangerous. Because DNS lookups are often run by syscalls which use your systems DNS (maybe systemd for example) and that will bypass that tor proxy. So you'll be leaking to your DNS server all the websites you think you are going to privately.

This is why I think the easiest message to get across to people is that if you want to do privacy you have two options:

1) Tor Browser, which has been scoured to ensure everything is going over Tor, or if you need non-browser software,

2) Whonix, which as an OS has been scoured to make sure everything is going over Tor. Whonix can be run from a VM (e.g. Oracle VirtualBox) or within QubesOS, or on physical hardware.

That being said, there is NO great solution for non-browser tor, because if you use Whonix and try to do things like git-clone, or nostr clients, or bitcoin-core, or whatever, you will find Tor has terrible performance and network connections will just suddenly die, and most software can't deal very well with suddenly terminating network connections. Just a simple git clone will drive you mad. I don't know why tor is so bad... maybe it is just bad for me (maybe the three-letter agencies are trying to boot me off tor) or maybe tor needs help. I don't really know.

A lot of devs seem to have given up on Nostr