You can block Mainline DHT access, which prevents you from participating at all. On the other hand, unless you can stop people from signing data, they could publish events to nostr by writing a letter.
One of these things is not like the other
Wow I just found nostr:npub13ndpm2hm9hud4azsq5euhf5mv3d05r90wymwxsd7rdn29609hhvqp60svh. He is so *smart* and not at all "retarded." 😏
I'm not sure if I should bother correcting his misunderstandings of nostr, or his misjudgements of what is and isn't censorable and why, or just ignore him. Does he listen or just talk? We will see.
I like pkarr. I like using Mainline DHT directly even more. I'm using it in Mosaic. But it is also censorable. The bittorrent DHT may not be subject to sybil attacks, but it only has 3 (AFAICT) public well-known on-ramps. Take those three down and people who don't already have a node list can't get on. Nostr is not better for bootstrapping (finding a person's relays) but it isn't much worse. There is a weak centralizing pressure to put relay lists on a the same well known popular relays, but those change over time and the pressure changes over time, and good clients republish to the current popular set which can move. The main issue is that client devs are all over the map in terms of how they choose to deal with the situation, and some aren't even using outbox model. IMHO (emphasis on H) the main benefit of the DHT is someone new with a single key they want to follow can get started without knowing anybody nor any relays/servers.
There is no censorability difference between homeservers in pkarr and relays in nostr. You can run your own, or you can outsource it, in both cases. One isn't more censorship resistant than the other.
When I look at https://github.com/pubky I see among top rpos "pubky-app" which says it is a deprecated repository, and will be replaced with pubky/franky. But pubky/franky does not exist. So IMHO there is no opensource pubky, which means I won't be using it and I recommend against.
Discussion
You are glorifying signing data and asking servers to host it, many less than those on Mainline.
There are millions of nodes that support the bep we use in Mainline.
Lots of people in China using Mainline?
You think data submitted to the DHT is not signed and can be shared by sms too? Why are you still trying to push this false dichotomy?
Huh? How do you publish or read pubky without access to Mainline? Also, pubky content is unsigned on your "home server". Pretty sure only your IP address is published to the DHT. These are two separate problems with the protocol
It's not my job to prove or disprove anything about pubky or to try and fix it.
But I know that you can publish messages to nostr using nothing more than a photograph of text with a timestamp, presumed identity, and signature block, because I actually did that
You are confusing so many things. Read BEP0044 if you are interested. You can post signed arbitrary data to ~20 nodes in the DHT and people can read them later.
This has nothing to do with pubky. This has existed for more than a decade.
This same signed data can be sent in anyway that nostr events can, nostr events are not special in that way. But the data that follow BEP0044 are special because they have that extra ability.
And by the way. Tons of nodes in China, don't take my word for it, run a node and crawl the dht and see how many nodes will have China ip addresses.
Mainline is there. You can use it, or not, but at least know reality if you are invested enough in the topic to keep replying by this false dichotomy.
I'm not invested enough to wander around pubky telling people not to use it. I am invested enough to defend what's valuable about nostr when people throw unsupported arguments around
I dunno, i am starting to think you are just some guy with a qr code fetish :)
I like your point. But we cannot compare the data half of nostr with the resolution half of pubky. Nostr strictly-speaking is the client-relay protocol, which can also be blocked. Pubky identities could also sign data and send them around with paper airplanes if they get blocked in China.
If I were on a mountain in Tibet with a 30 year old laptop, I could write a spicy political message. A photographer could take a picture of me with my laptop in the background displaying a QR code, and publish it in a book. If anyone who saw that book scanned the QR code and recognized that it was nostr data, re-encoded, and published it to a relay, it would be 100% indistinguishable from me using nostr on the latest iPhone from a Starbucks in New York. And anyone who knew my pubkey would know that this content was precisely what I had written.
An interactive, DHT based protocol will never be this censorship resistant
Yes, nostr has a relay portion, but it's only an optimization over the data portion. You can "use" nostr without relays if you need to