Subnostr

I love being on #nostr

I started because nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m was doing it. I saw his npub on his profile and his https://primal.net/jack URL

But as I stayed I understood how cool Nostr is with a self sovereign key pair that gives you access to the smart-client dumb-server truly decentralized protocol

Sometimes I do though worry if the US government could launch a coordinated attack on Nostr relays and block them

Is it possible or are there too many relays for that to be feasible?

#asknostr

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Discussion

Luke 9mo ago

I feel like they could try if they really wanted to, but it be on existing relays and new ones could be spun up fast, not to mention all the private relays already running… I doubt they’d even mess with those

maven leo 9mo ago

They can only ban (by IP address) known relays. I doubt they can do anything about relays in like Belgium and South Africa

Dikaios1517 9mo ago

It's feasible, particularly with how reliant we currently are on DNS. If we no longer needed traditional DNS to connect to relays, that would help make Nostr much harder to take down. However, DNS has the advantage of human-readable addressing for relays. If someone asks, "Which relay should I use?" I can tell them "Nostr.wine is a good paid relay," thanks to using DNS. If we went to an onion routing system or something similar, it would be more like, "buhqfhqa7t351qjkfdba863245hqkk44978afbfaakjgwe.onion is a good one to try out."

In the end, though, I think they won't bother with trying to go after relays unless they are a haven for something the government can readily paint as undeserving of free-speech protections. This is why I think relay implementations need to have robust moderation tools so operators can clean out any CSAM.

maven leo 9mo ago

What if anti-government groups start using Nostr in, say, Brazil? 🤔

Or, in India? That’s free speech?

Dikaios1517 9mo ago

Yeah, and they can totally do DNS blocks against whatever relays they see the anti-government speech occurring on. For that use-case, folks would probably want to use Tor relays anyway.

maven leo 9mo ago

I think TOR is a peer-to-peer routing system … so, basically, privately hosted servers off of the main “Internet”

Dikaios1517 9mo ago

It's kind of the opposite of peer-to-peer, actually. It's called onion routing because your connection from origin to destination and back is routed through multiple hops along the way, and each hop only knows where the request came from, and where it is going next, but doesn't know if either are the original origin or destination, or just another hop in the chain. Peer-to-peer would be where the origin and destination communicate with one another directly, with no servers in-between.

Each has different privacy tradeoffs.

Say you want to communicate with someone you trust, and you don't want anyone else to have any ability to see what you are saying. Well then, encrypted peer-to-peer is a pretty good option.

If you don't really trust who you are communicating with, and don't want them connecting to you directly such that they would see your IP etc, then Tor is the better option.

maven leo 9mo ago

Awesome 👏

maven leo 9mo ago

You’re incredible as always, fren!