Then find/build a different client. There are 10s of them now and many more in the future. Clients don’t own the data, and it would be a lot harder for them to implement censorship than a relay, nor are they as incentivize because of that fact. However, they are still beholden to App Store requirements (for those that are in the App Store) and there are some requirements about responding to user reports that could eventually impact this. For now that means any user can block content from any user - which isn’t censorship. But the code is open and there are many many clients, and to truly censor, you’d have to remove content from either all clients or all relays.
Discussion
Banning relays would also be a like a game of whack a mole and largely ineffective - you could just pop a new DNS in front of it, or route it through a local network. It would be almost impossible to keep up with and I don’t know why clients would be incentivized to do so. I think what is more likely to happen is that people flock around relays with potentially different ethos or community goals, and users participate in the ones that align with their goals. If you have something extreme to say, are you guaranteed everyone will hear it? No, but you should still be able to get it out to those that want to. And I think people are just as entitled about what they don’t see/hear on these platforms as what they do. The goal should be user empowerment to configure and tune in to whatever it is they are interested in, and tune out to things that they aren’t.
Sadly the “don’t like it, build your own XYZ” has been the excuse/response from day one on the censorship topic.
You can build it, but the app won’t be accepted into the AppStore. Apple/Google will just ban it if it accepts speech from those that they don’t like etc.
The story of Gab is what will keep happening again and again. Their solution was to own the hardware and build a PWA. It’s centralised, but it’s theirs.
It’s sad, but I foresee Nostr really not solving this problem. Happy to be proven wrong.
You can run clients locally today - worst case, that is always an option. The data is there and the client is really just about the user experience of interacting with it. Pretty much all the web clients can be run on your own machine, not to mention the majority of the clients don’t have to go through App Store approval as they’re web based. Web clients are interacting with relays client side (your computer is querying the relay, not the applications server) too, so they’re really not even set up to ban relays. You’re not coupled to any one client or relay - your identity is decentralized and your content is redundantly stored. What you’re describing would be fairly difficult to accomplish with nostr.
The most effective form of this is China’s citizens ability to access nostr. Damus is blocked in their App Store and many relay URLs have been blocked from the entire country. In a lot of instances, relays have just put up a new domain that routes to the same relay and they’ve been able to allow them to continue to connect - we still have people from China participating on nostr. That is a good example of the game of whack a mole that I was describing. And US censorship does not look like that today. In either case, we will continue to iterate and improve.