Nostr Web Client

Yes - that can happen. But because your identity isn’t tied to a relay, you can post and be read on other relays. There likely will be more specialized relays that are developed that are stricter about the content (maybe by topic or audience - think kid friendly, nsfw only, a place for book reviews), relay operators are fully entitled to make the decision about what they host (not to mention the risks of hosting some content, legally speaking), and people can get banned - this is already happening with spam accounts and content. It’s relay redundancy and a decentralized identity that makes it more censorship resistant.

Caleb McDonald 2y ago

Sounds like Nostr is still vulnerable to users being targeted for censorship though - as in all the relays being of the same mind regarding a particular account (like what happened to AJ with all the big tech sites).

As well as what happened to Gab when they joined the fediverse - all the other instances banned Gab’s, completely isolating them and destroying the whole point of the fediverse.

I’m no software engineer, but would have thought a ledger aka blockchain technology being implemented as the only way to allow true free speech without risk of being censored. 🤔 🤷🏻‍♂️

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Discussion

Katie 2y ago

Hmm. It’s not a blockchain, just a decentralized protocol. And anyone can run a relay… don’t like the way the operators are running their relays? You can run one of your own. You’re entitled to have relays to write to, even if they’re just your own run relay. And whether you can get people to join and participate depends on if you have valuable content that people want to read 🤷🏻‍♀️ no centralized force can make that call, but supply/demand certainly could - collectively, most people have decided they don’t want spam and flock to relays that handle that. If there are people who want to read your content, there will be relays that will show it. This community is pretty interested in censorship prevention and most relay operators are doing what they can do maintain that. If they deviate from that ethos, people will likely take their content elsewhere. It’s fully within the rights of relay operators and users to wield those choices.

johnny 2y ago

Uff, you couldn’t say it better 👏🏼, effectively everyone is free to consume the content they want and also everyone is free to control the content they want to consume. Nostr has taken a giant step to improve human communications.

Caleb McDonald 2y ago

True, however the censorship can still happen at the client level though… preventing certain relays from being entered/used..?

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Caleb McDonald 2y ago

I tried to include a post of mine… clearly didn’t work 😆

Katie 2y ago

Then find/build a different client. There are 10s of them now and many more in the future. Clients don’t own the data, and it would be a lot harder for them to implement censorship than a relay, nor are they as incentivize because of that fact. However, they are still beholden to App Store requirements (for those that are in the App Store) and there are some requirements about responding to user reports that could eventually impact this. For now that means any user can block content from any user - which isn’t censorship. But the code is open and there are many many clients, and to truly censor, you’d have to remove content from either all clients or all relays.

Katie 2y ago

Banning relays would also be a like a game of whack a mole and largely ineffective - you could just pop a new DNS in front of it, or route it through a local network. It would be almost impossible to keep up with and I don’t know why clients would be incentivized to do so. I think what is more likely to happen is that people flock around relays with potentially different ethos or community goals, and users participate in the ones that align with their goals. If you have something extreme to say, are you guaranteed everyone will hear it? No, but you should still be able to get it out to those that want to. And I think people are just as entitled about what they don’t see/hear on these platforms as what they do. The goal should be user empowerment to configure and tune in to whatever it is they are interested in, and tune out to things that they aren’t.

Caleb McDonald 2y ago

Sadly the “don’t like it, build your own XYZ” has been the excuse/response from day one on the censorship topic.

You can build it, but the app won’t be accepted into the AppStore. Apple/Google will just ban it if it accepts speech from those that they don’t like etc.

The story of Gab is what will keep happening again and again. Their solution was to own the hardware and build a PWA. It’s centralised, but it’s theirs.

It’s sad, but I foresee Nostr really not solving this problem. Happy to be proven wrong.

Katie 2y ago

You can run clients locally today - worst case, that is always an option. The data is there and the client is really just about the user experience of interacting with it. Pretty much all the web clients can be run on your own machine, not to mention the majority of the clients don’t have to go through App Store approval as they’re web based. Web clients are interacting with relays client side (your computer is querying the relay, not the applications server) too, so they’re really not even set up to ban relays. You’re not coupled to any one client or relay - your identity is decentralized and your content is redundantly stored. What you’re describing would be fairly difficult to accomplish with nostr.

Katie 2y ago

The most effective form of this is China’s citizens ability to access nostr. Damus is blocked in their App Store and many relay URLs have been blocked from the entire country. In a lot of instances, relays have just put up a new domain that routes to the same relay and they’ve been able to allow them to continue to connect - we still have people from China participating on nostr. That is a good example of the game of whack a mole that I was describing. And US censorship does not look like that today. In either case, we will continue to iterate and improve.