I love your sentiment and I agree with pre-facebook era vibe - the computer was there to do wild shit and burn CDs...similar to reality TV screwing up MTV, socials and porn have cheapened the average potential. However, you're forgetting about Uncle Sammy...Snowden was over a decade ago...that work has been kept up, expanded, and supercharged. They know when you take a shit, and they have everyone fooled into thinking, "Well as long as I don't commit a crime..." I'm sure the 19th century slaves thought the same just before they got lynched without provocation.
Discussion
Sure but back in the Usenet days everything was sent in the clear anyway, there was no encryption, so the government didn't need special spying programmes to watch you. They just asked your phone company.
Today, especially since Snowden, there is a battle of cat and mouse between the government and encryption.
If you wanted to stay anon on Nostr you could run relays through Tor hidden services and access your client only through Tor.
Given the most popular relay already has Tor functionality (Nostream) this can be done now. Won't be long until a Tor setting in Nostr apps is the norm either. Until then you can use Orbot.
And good luck trying to regulate relays like the government is tryna regulate legacy social media. It's unenforceable. You can run relays from servers in Belize paid for in non-KYC coinjoined BTC and run em through Tor.
Yes the gov has levelled up since Snowden for sure but "we can code faster than you can regulate" remains truer than ever.