Really? I don't see any way to get censorship resistance without it. It enables users to switch servers without permission, and servers to switch IP addresses without permission, and encodes how clients can follow them when they move. And moving about freely and even rapidly lets people and servers evade censorship attempts by Internet providers, DNS providers, etc.
Discussion
If you need DNS or a static IP to find my events, that's trivial to shut down. On the other hand if I spray events all over, some of them might find you. There's obviously efficiency problems there, but it gets the job done when other things can't
Oh ok. I get what you are saying now. I'm not really on board but now I get the alternative and the theory behind it.
This idea that servers are easy to shutdown if they have static IP is soooo overrated... Signal and similar services have been using reverse proxies to play a cat and mouse game with ip black listing to great success for long time.
If your DNS layer is on Mainline, then you can basically play this game even better since the harder attack (at icann level) won't affect you either.
You are right, servers offering data integrity is OBVIOUSLY better.
Also, this is not either or... even if data integrity got in the way, just sign a single file and gossip it... what is the big deal?
Why are people rejecting structure and integrity and reliability is beyond me.
If it's optional advice that's fine, but if it's required, any interruption prevents you from publishing new events
Ok fine, people took authenticated data structures to retarded degrees, most famously the linked list.
But Bittorrent already works as I described, you have a merkle tree over the full torrent file, and you can use Mainline to update the latest hash of your mutable torrent.
So I think we agree.
If there's a more reliable but less available feed that you can layer other nostr events over, that sounds good to me. My take is that relays are just one possible way to optimize distribution - the fundamental core of nostr is signing things and distributing them