In my eyes, the biggest draw of Nostr has never been censorship resistence. It has always been possible to shrug off censorship from the very moment that the first microblogging platform was launched. Simply by switching to plain old blogging. Run your own relay? Nah dude, just run your own Wordpress site.

The true advantage of microblogging and Nostr is the promise to the user: that the user themselves can choose what content is filtered for them or not. And that the user themselves can figure out exactly what content they aren't seeing. Microblogging exists because the user shouldn't have to run their own damn web-spider just to be able to have their best possible content feed.

However, I believe that Nostr has not yet fulfilled this promise. What does a new user see the moment they make a Nostr account? They see a list of relays, but every single relay looks exactly the same. It isn't possible to determine what their policy is for storing notes because the protocol isn't designed with that in mind.

But look at Mastadon and Activity Pub, and you'll be able to see EXACTLY what an instance is about. You can scroll through the list of blocked instances, or often, a list of individual moderator decisions. Nostr has no equivalent and it's devastating.

This isn't about the ability to post or to read, it's about the ability to connect with the people you want to, even if you had no idea they would be there.