Many relays can’t be directly accessed from China. Once the outbox model becomes more common, Chinese users will have a hard time fetching the events they want. I think a proxy relay can help to some extent, but if too many people use it, it might get blocked too haha.
Discussion
Would it be possible to reach a proxy relay over Tor?
Tor barely works in China.
if there was a way for example, to pay for a connection through to another relay and auth could be proxied forward, nostr could replace tor for china users
i've been talking about this idea for a while but it requires a new protocol/nip
Yes, but the catch is the price can’t be too high—otherwise, why not just use a VPN haha.
yeah, i like the idea of public readable, subscribe to write, and for the relays to proactively aggregate the content of user's follows on other relays
then you just pay for one relay and except for posting DMs to you (which need to be from whitelisted users, to your paid relay, which protects their privacy with auth) all of your content is found and you can access it in one place.
with many such relays, they will dynamically aggregate relevant data for users and when one path is blocked, other paths can be found and new relays can be placed on them (which can be as simple as adding an IP address and/or domain name to access the same relay).
having tools to rapidly and simply spin up new relays and using aggregation spiders will keep the censors hopping from one thing to the next and never really stopping the leak.
Why would they? Wouldn't outbox make it easier? Yes, they may need a proxy relay still but my understanding of outbox is that the goal is that people post to the relays of their followers / people they follow. So wouldn't that mean more chinese relays get fueled with content? And if not they'd still be able to connect to their proxy relay. Most people have really big relays so those will keep getting fueled.
In simple terms, the outbox model works by posting your own events to your outbox relays and events that mention others to their inbox relays. So when you want to fetch a user’s events, you have to go to their outbox relays.
Now, imagine I follow a European user whose outbox/inbox relays I can’t connect to—how would I find their events or mention them? This is exactly the issue the outbox model faces under China’s network environment.
this is why relays should include aggregators, and the aggregators can dynamically work around blocks by always looking for more relays to search. my relay includes an aggregator with the first "follows" based whitelist mode, and the "seconddegree" mode i will make extends that to searching for follows follows and both whitelisting the users and subscribing for their events.
if all relays did this, it would defeat the great firewall because people could spin up new relays and aggregate content and bypass their whack-a-mole blacklist system. china firewall can't be a whitelist system, because it would impede business too much, so this would be an effective countermeasure.