All of the nostr apps can be counted. It’s not that big of an effort to threaten every single app.
The same goes for relays.
I think people are delusional to think nostr can’t be effectively shut down.
Discussion
Obviously relays and and apps can get shut down..
The difference in shutting down Telegram vs. Nostr (the actual protocol) is that you shut down a centralized unit and users can't do shit with their data posted there after shutdown compared to shutting down Amethyst, people just login somewhere else with their key pair and it's all back.
The protocol lives and new simple self hosted protocol using apps can be built.
Yeah it will survive, no doubt about that, but surviving and thriving are different things. We don’t want to simply survive, we want to thrive no matter the levels of global pressure. Right now I can’t see how we’d do that.
I think that's the better phrasing you were trying to aim at. Not that nostr can be shut down, or that it can be prevented from thriving, but heavily suppressed to thrive.
With that in mind, I think the goal here then is to keep on working and trying to make more useful products that deliver more value then current ones in the marke, and new values. Hard? Definitely. Possible? Definitely. When? Hopefully sooner rather than later with an exponential rate.
I could have added some context :) but fired off right away
That would be really hard, it would hard to thrive with government actors breathing down your necks, It's not that hard to survive though, it takes an immense amount of wealth, coordination and knowledge to keep up the censor on something that is this decentralized.
Maybe we don't need to pack a punch? Maybe we just need to tire them out?
Anyways my two sats. Agree with your sentiments on fortifying ofcourse.
I'm more worried about things that are already centralized and in govt control. Like github. What nostr:npub1t89vhkp66hz54kga4n635jwqdc977uc2crnuyddx7maznwfrpupqwra5h9 is building is extremely important.
I say this meaning well. If we can visualize how the state(s) may crack down on the protocol, we can build more resilient systems that withstand any pressure.
Just because you can count it doesn't mean you can stop it. Take gossip for example, how do you shut it down? It's not on an app store not on a DNS.
Even DNS based WebApps can be run from their built html.
Also the relays that you can count on nostr.watch aren't the only relays.
They can make the experience worse, yes. But they can never kill the protocol for those who need it.
Government tried to kill torrents and IPTV for years, they failed, Nostr is akin to these protocols, sure you can stop one here and there but in the end it’s like weed, it will inevitably regrow.
Nostr is not perfect, nothing is, but it’s a 1000 times more censorship resistant than telegram.
I don’t think so
I take Nostr down, who should I arrest?
Where do I erase all the hard drives keeping notes?
You don’t need to arrest everyone, just a handful of prominent operators. The rest scatter. See coinjoin
This is true inside one jurisdiction
Let’s see how the Nostr blob adapt to censorship. It will be a lot more interesting than the telegram story
Best case is it happens, and we persist regardless - great marketing. Not sure if nostr will do well just yet, but I hope devs are considering all possible scenarios.
Id flowchart all scenarios and think of ways to safeguard against all - until the protocol is untouchable
The Bitcoin and payment integration will play a role, if we come up with ecash private payment to incentivise Relay provider, this will also strengthen the network dramatically.
This is something traditional media do not have.
Bitcoin is Nostr heartbeat, if the former fail then Nostr will fail too
When you kill telegram you take all the data down, DMs and so on.
Take a Nostr app down and I’ll use another one.
I have my Relay at home, this one is not getting down anytime soon
You are right, but the spread across different countries would require coordination between governments.
They do this already and I hear there’s more coordination laws that were just passed
The first step is to not deny the problem but to acknowledge the problem. That's what too many people in this community can't handle. Because... BULLISH!!! 🤪
Nostr is a protocol and basically just set of rules around which people build different apps. No one can stop nostr but you are right about apps and relays. In future I am sure we're gonna see many such cases.
If I run a relay which propagates illegal content and the government decides to fuck me - I am fucked. Before locking me up they might try to put a pressure on me to reveal the IP of the users who distribute illegal content and if I am unable or unwilling to do so - I am fucked.
From the users perspective the only way to use nostr absolutely privately and anonymously is though tor as all relays are aware of users IP addresses.
But the thing is - anyone can run relay and the most important thing is to decentralize relays as much as possible so that there is really no "one head to cut off". And I am sure they will try to intimidate replay owners buy fucking up some people as an example eventually.
Ya we need everyone to run a relay probably for best chances
I’d love to see the word salad justification for targeting the creators of open source apps built for peace, cooperation, self sustainability, and community
Make a new nip that will make each phone a relay with keet
I'd just go to microsoft and let them censor/shutdown github.
Still don't understand how pople don't see this obvious attack vector.
Supposedly we have GitHub alternatives now. But shutting down a repo wouldn’t kill a project as maintainers have it on localhost
In the same way our governments stopped the pirate bay? 😉
Decentralization means resilience and low cost of switching providers. You can deploy an infinity of Relays and web clients on an infinity of domains
Torrents are p2p and we don’t have this. More centralized than we’d like to think
But people can choose to run relays in the same way they can choose to seed torrents for others to use, so why not?
Like I said in other comments, nostr will survive because people can always run their relays and post from local even, but that’s not a thriving environment.
They've done that this year against Monero. It survived.
You can threaten popular apps like Primal and so on to introduce backdoors, you can threaten popular nodes to censor texts.
What you can't do is stop them. Someone, somewhere will host a node with the forbidden texts and our apps will still be able to reach them.
It won't be shutdown, albeit you are right they will try their best to break it.