If your censorship-resistance model involves asking everybody in the world to migrate from client A that is blocking someone to client B that isn't blocking then Nostr hasn't given you anything Twitter/Facebook/Substack/YouTube/Rumble/Mastodon were not giving you.
Discussion
How can we solve this?
Is it then the case that the “threat” of users leaving a client is what will keep clients from blocking?
Not true. On nostr you own your contacts list.
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Though the open nature of the protocol makes the switching costs of changing clients significantly lower than with a centralized model, or a semi-decentralized model like ActivityPub.
I been saying that for over a week and I get called a troll and blocked
If your censorship resistance model involves asking everyone in the world to migrate from relay A that is blocking someone to relay B that isn’t then Nostr hasn’t given you anything that Twitter/…/Mastodon were not giving you.
Huh?? If I'm unhappy with what Twitter client A is blocking I can't move to Twitter client B which runs using different rules. Yes it's inconvenient to switch Nostr clients, but it's not worthless to give people the choice. It's actually a tremendous power that we gave up in Web 2.0 apps.
Good point. It is a improvement. But it's more like a 10% improvement instead of 100% improvement that Nostr has originally promised. Maybe I am overthinking this.
What is a downside of switching a client if your entire network and data can be migrated?
I still think Nostr is not particularly good at censorship resistance. From that perspective it is pretty similar to that of RSS, or ActivityPub which have been around for a while. At the end of the day if most companies don’t want to host your stuff then it will be hard to keep it visible. Nostr isn’t peer to peer (yet, anyway).
What’s special isn’t that there are no rules, it’s that you get to choose which rules you want to play by. You choose this in your clients and choice of relays. Most people will want their relay owners to respond to reports, support deletes and blocks, etc. But rather than it being some small group at a big American tech company doing the censoring it can be your friend or your peers or money or some other method you choose.
It is never the case that most companies don't want to host your stuff, it always takes just 2 or 3 companies and you're effectively deplatformed, since your followers are all in these 2 or 3 and they can't move and they won't move.
If their clients made it easy for them to keep following you would wouldn't lose 99% of your followers as it is today, maybe about 5% due to logistics issues that we can't solve.
What worries me the most at the moment is that the next wave of people prefer more convenience and are not too willing to learn new things or pay for them.
Video hosting becomes expensive. The data needs to go somewhere. The big players will step in and introduce the same old models again: we host your media and it’s all free for you. And the rest will follow from there. Data ownership and security do not worry many people.
Email is not decentralised anymore. It just does not get deliver unless you’re part of the big players. The protocol does not matter if the monetisation model overdrives it.
Nostr needs to become so easy and convenient for the masses with the model that is decentralised and in line with the OG vision of censorship resistance etc. that is preferred over the old models that will be introduced soon (if enough people join and nostr becomes a viable alternative).
I think the main benefit is owning your own identity. So if you are deplatformed by most big clients and relays, your followers still have the ability to find your notes in other places using the same public key. Yes, probably most of your followers won’t go through the trouble of changing clients, but those who want actually have the ability to do so. This is something unique to NOSTR.
That’s what most troubling about it — we gave up power.
The web had serious problems and centralizing incentivizes from the start, but we gave up even the power we had.
My fear is that the incentives are still there, and if they don’t change we’ll end up in the same place again in a couple years.
Is the worry that a client will block certain npubs regardless of whether a user wants to follow that npub?
I thought only relays determine note propagation. What prevents users from choosing different relays within the same client?