For context in case someone other than me actually does want to read this: I met digit on reddit, where she was a mod of a subreddit I got banned from by her boyfriend and she reached out to me to invite me to the discord channel for the same community. I had stopped using Discord in my efforts to migrate towards decentralized systems, and I usually had a rule against letting women pull me onto centralized shit I'm against using, but I was having a mental breakdown and extremely lonely and it meant so much to me that she reached out to me, I joined the Discord. That was on Thanksgiving, 51 years after the UNIX epoch (almost 3 years ago). She and I got close at one point but then her friends manipulated her to hate me and I ended up banned from the Discord channel, and so did she. Last year, I was terrified of Digit killing herself or having her cancer come back, and I was trying to find any way to be valuable for her from afar, and I thought maybe I could create a space on a decentralized platform where people didn't hate me and I wasn't going to get banned and I could invite her to a better place while she was banned from the place we got to know each other in, like how she invited me to Discord when I was banned from a subreddit, except hopefully with a better outcome. But since nostr didn't work until after she disappeared, the best "decentralized platform" I could find seemed to be bluesky, which was a huge mistake because they also had bans and everyone did hate me and I did get banned. It was a complete waste of time, and if nostr would have been functional, it would have been the obvious better choice and maybe this wouldn't have happened. Maybe nostr could have helped me repair my friendship with Digit before she disappeared. This made me extremely bitter to people involved in nostr in the early days for the mistakes that stopped it from working for me while being able to use it just fine themselves due to not being as woke/targeted as me. I'll never be able to move on from this bitterness if she isn't safe but I'm thankful that some of those early nostr people have been tolerant of my bitterness even before I could really explain it.
My memory on my early experience with nostr is a bit foggy so I should write down what I remember now and save it in text.
I don't have record of the first npubs I made. The first npub I still have record of was used for testing private messages and it didn't really work so I abandoned it. This was early last year. The other npubs I made around that time were also for testing stuff and I didn't really find nostr functional enough to gain momentum so I didn't try to help it gain momentum as an early user beyond bits of testing.
The earliest npub I actually used regularly was in October last year, when Digit had disappeared a couple months prior and more recently Gaza had come under assault. That npub was nostr:npub1e3q7qqf4jreeqw8g04edqjpcnvpzws0enxhp0xgvxfru4xj0wz9smm9ujj which I treated as temporary because I assumed I would need to cycle npubs later (because I didn't know anything about nos2x etc while setting that one up).
It felt really frustrating that nostr was working better now that digit had already disappeared.
That npub I mentioned from October last year ended up getting shadowbanned. As I remember, I was saying violent hateful things about Israelis which would get a person banned on Twitter, to see if nostr would allow such statements. If I remember correctly, there was a particular Israel supporter who had connections who I really upset and it snowballed from there. I think my notifications were the first thing that stopped working, then I stopped being able to send direct messages to people I had been chatting with and it became inconsistent for my public posts to show up, especially in arguments and places where I was talking about the shadowban. This then stopped being npub-specific and started seeming to apply to all my npubs at the time. My mom helped me test it and there's still a post from her on bluesky talking about it from back then. No attempts to discuss the topic lead anywhere, there's zero engagement on that bluesky post for example.
There are a lot of gaps in my memory, like: what public posts couldn't I get to go through? Was it actually that posts wouldn't go through (as it definitely was with direct messages after extensive testing) or was it just that post visibility wasn't consistent, and that combined with lack of notifications made it impossible to have fair debates? My paranoia and bitterness and being distracted worrying about digit all make the answers to these questions foggy in my memory, and if I didn't write this down, soon I'd have fog clouding the parts about direct messages and notifications too.
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