I’m saying Nostr doesn’t have the qualities we’re actually dreaming of when it comes to communication we can’t censor. This isn’t the bitcoin to crypto.. somehow the alt coin came first. And so maybe usability is simply better at this point. I haven’t seen a single post on Damus that someone couldn’t have posted on Twitter (aside from porn spam which I’m sure we all love). I think Twitter and lighting would just be better. Again, maybe I’m just a hater
Discussion
I’ve seen multiple accounts be suspended for x number of days (or permanently) on Twitter for tweeting about subjects that twitter’s team deem inappropriate. I haven’t seen this happen on nostr yet.
I've also seen accounts being suspended for speaking against Elon’s decisions. Again, no CEO on nostr.
That’s a big proof of concept for censorship resistance here.
In nostr you write a post and send it to a server. Relays can accept it or censor it. The latter: you just make your own relay. But there’s no cost to you or anyone else doing this, there’s no proof of work. It can be meddled with (and again, sure, you could create your own network) but you’re (1) choosing to ignore what’s supposedly on the server already (aka censoring) or (2) it’s cheap to create hostile relays that collude. It’s probably better for free speech than Twitter, but god it’s so painful as a base layer. At least to me.
Has there been cases of relays censoring notes ? Or this is just theoretical ?
From what I understand you could create one and do it
If users figured out that my relay was doing this, wouldn’t they just stop using it and use other relays instead ? Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of having a relay ?
Ye, if they knew, they would. Defeat the point in what sense? On a technical level, why not just have one global relay then? If no one would ever use a relay nefariously then surely one would just be enough?
If you only have on relay for everyone, then how is your network decentralized ? Hard to be censorship resistant with a centralized entity
Ok. I agree fully. I’m
Or advocating for one relay, but you said what’s the point of having a relay if people can just unfollow it? I’m saying it so cheap to make relays that “good” relays can easily turn into “bad” relays.
But check out https://habla.news/ for example. I think it’ll highlight one of the most powerful things here.
Damus (and other clients) are using the nostr protocol for twitter-like functions, but habla uses it for articles. And there’s other clients too (imagine something like instagram).
Across all these services you can use the same key, the same account. And all the data exists simultaneously across all the relays you publish to.
Agree. There's so much that can be build on an open protocol. Like how interesting was TCP/IP in the first couple years? How about Unix?
It doesn't matter if it's perfectly analogous to a cryptocurrency. But to go that route, one could argue there wasn't a lot of innovation in #Bitcoin or #Ethereum for a couple years; just bug fixes and "so, uh, hay guys".
I don’t think you can compare TCP/IP to Nostr, or bitcoin. They’re just completely different things