I started reading and stopped at Bluesky PBC. What is your take? It seems like an insanely long explanation for something so simple.
This is a pretty well-researched account of what happened, both the good and the bad. Sadly you won't find many even lightly-researched takes of this here on nostr.
https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-censorship-and-country-based-moderation/
Discussion
My take is it's pretty much the same as what would happen to Nostr there, if Nostr weren't so small.
Right now these "banned" bluesky accounts can be accessed in Turkey by at least 3 or 4 other bluesky clients (atproto clients), including iOS, Android and web. And probably several more. But that's because the Turkish government sees these other clients as inconsequential.
The key point is governments these days are far more tech-savvy than they used to be.
Nostr would be no more resistant to the censoring efforts of a tech-savvy government than atproto, or farcaster, or pubky, or keet, or anything else provided it were big enough. All would be trivially easy for that government to make useless for the majority of its population. In a week.
When talking of censorship resistance it's only really meaningful if talking about resistance to in-house censorship. To in-house moderation teams. Anything on the government side—that's a fever dream in 2025. If you're big enough or sensitive enough to be deemed necessary to censor then you're censored.
Please describe the steps the Turkish government would take to censor a Nostr user.
1 identify user
2 imprison
If we're imagining a future where nostr is quite big then Country X (it could be one of many) would likely go after the protocol ecosystem in general. But anyway:
1. Request larger app clients remove access to the person in question for users in that country.
2. Request Apple remove Damus and Primal from the App store (assuming neither complies, and assuming other clients like Nostur are far enough off the radar)
3. Request Google remove Amethyst and Primal from Play (same assumption)
4. Firewall off domains of the top10 or 20 relays (even 5 would likely cause enough chaos, assuming the degree of relay clumping in this imaginary future is as high as it is now.)
5. If wanting to go the extra mile ask relay domain extension companies to revoke domain ownership for TOS violations (they're sure to find *something*), and for a few larger relay domains. For example .mom, .lol, .band, .wine... these domains are all administered by private companies that have their own terms on top of ICANN's, and if you read those terms you'll see what I mean. (This is why you've got archive.ph and archive.md and not archive.mom or archive.lol -- certain cctlds are less proactive).
6. Firewall off access to Nostr.build and any other large media host.
7. Contact any third-party CDN being used by larger media hosts (Akamai, Fastly, etc.) with similar stop-serving-for-this-geo requests
8. Firewall off access to web domains of popular web clients.
9. Whatever else is needed.
Or in whatever other order. Adjust country by country. How many of these steps would be needed? Maybe just a few would make nostr pretty much unusable for most quite-unquote normal users in the country, and you'd imagine that's often the goal.