It's hard for some people (including highly-technical Bluesky developers) to understand that either you have censorship by a central committee or you have real decentralization with any host being able to censor whatever they want.
Any claims to the contrary are likely to come from either clueless or malicious actors and eventually end in the first situation.
Perfectly put. More than likely there will always be censorship. To presume any platform fixes that is foolishness.
I don't think Nostr was ever intended to have no censorship at all, but to be censorship resistant.
I run a relay, and I limit notes it stores to people in my web of trust. Is that censorship? If someone mutes another user so they don't see their notes, is that censorship? Or is choosing what you see and broadcast actually part of your own freedom of speech?
I'm pretty confident I can get my notes out amidst any circumstance.
- I subscribe to a couple good paid relays.
- I run my own relay on a VPS.
- If all those fail, or refuse to host my notes, I have a relay ready to go on my home PC that I can start in an instant.
- If that fails I have a relay setup on my phone, connecting over tor, that I can turn on.
I don't know of any other protocol that gives me those kinds of options.
Resistant vs proof. Exactly right. But I think many believe it’s proof. And ironically, you will see notes from people thinking there needs to be more filtering at the relay level since clients are limited.
Now that outbox is getting to be widespread amongst clients I think relays filtering is less of a problem. It's not just a few main relays anymore, there are thousands, and you don't need common relays to pass notes. Anyone with a minimum of hardware and technical knowledge can run one, for just themselves, or for a community.
This is incomplete, but still relevant. I know nostr:nprofile1qqsdfx5syw3pmwsm8jpsdj3kn0ejg0vtgju0pdk3r9nq0aasny863hcpr9mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wdnxcctjv5hxxmmd9uq35amnwvaz7tmnv4hxg6t59ehx7umxd3shyefwvdhk6tce90cwc has an option using CloudFlare I should add.
Anyone truly concerned with moderation by other people should be running their own relay. Otherwise they're just LARPing.
Running your own client is even easier than running your own relay and you can use it to fetch content from any relay. If a client censors content, users can and should dismiss it.
Preach!
When you say “any host being able to censor,” that’s really just each relay applying its own filtering policy. That’s not the same as censorship by a central committee; it’s decentralization in action because users can choose other relays or run their own.
This distinction matters a lot. We encounter the same confusion with Bitcoin: people call spam filtering “censorship,” when in fact filters are local choices that nodes make about what to relay or prioritize. No one can stop a valid transaction from spreading if peers decide to forward it. Confusing censorship with filtering makes it much harder to have a clear discussion about spam.
You’re not wrong. 😀
The freedom is to be able to say "no".. anyone ..to anyone ..any time ...
When noone does that on my behalf !
Exactly my point - standing on business —> #BSVchain for #NOSTR code host. #Github will become a #Rugpull #SafeHarbor is #BSVchain <— the most hated red headed stepchild for the win! The BSV NOSTR Relay #DAPP should be called #BlackSheep.
