The above is a basic truism of all internet services. If you connect to a server/relay/provider of any sort, then they can attach your IP address to your account on the network. Which can then be used to find your address, real name, jurisdiction, etc.

This is true for the network you connect to with Nostr as well. It’s designed to be open and decentralized, but basic privacy issues haven’t changed.

A VPN is a service that you connect to that hides your IP address behind a facade. They only see the VPN service address, not yours. So you protect yourself from exposing your potential location and ID from being relatively easy to discover while you casually browse the internet.

But understand this isn’t a problem unique to #nostr, you don’t have to know or care about this at all to use #nostr. It’s simply that the community and bitcoiners who built Nostr care about privacy and security in a way that most people don’t. So they make suggestions for some basic practices that most people don’t think about.

That said, there is certainly an element that if we really care about these issues, we need to find ways to implement them by default, so the typical user can benefit from them, without having to understand how it works.