I've been brainstorming of a way to adapt Tor's Snowflake proxy approach, but for allowing users to access nostr in countries that are blocking/censoring access to either web clients or relays.

The gist of the idea is that say for example a user in China is trying to access nostr: anyone would be able to host a nostr proxy that then connects that user in China to an assortment of relays, but all their ISP would see is that they're connected to wss:// *random generated relay address*

The challenging part is there would need to be a way for all these proxy addresses to be compiled and accessible to that user without involving pinging a centralized URL/API that can just be blocked.

The proxy itself could be a modified fork of nostr-proxy, since that already does the "connect to many other relays to read/write on behalf of the user" part.

Similarly, if we make it as easy as clicking a button in order to deploy a web client like Snort or Iris on the cloud, and then have an automatically compiled list of all the Snort/Iris instances deployed, then a user could better avoid blocking of the web clients too.

https://snowflake.torproject.org/

https://github.com/Dolu89/nostr-proxy

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

If your do this I'll host one.

This team may be worth contacting for ideas and to understand the problem space. Next meeting is tomorrow.

https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team