Guard retention means being good at open guard. This is my current understanding. Open guard is about controlling with points instead of area.
By shadowban, if we mean that a platform stops to recommend your content in other people’s feeds, then yes, a decentralized network solves this particular problem. Here we are talking about global public discussions.
The concept of ownership matters. Nobody owns the global and it’s public space. Nobody is the creator of the universe.
However, group chats are public but not global. Groups have clear ownerships.
Constraining a group chat in a finite set of servers is a desired property.
A member could be banned by both the physical server owner or the logical group owner.
In case the group owner is banned by the server, this owner can migrate all the data to another server and invite all members back.
The problem of conventional platforms such as facebook is actually not that it's centralized, at least not the full picture.
The problem before centralization vs decentralization is either data is signed.
A centralized platform does not require signed data.
But, what if all data are signed and still server oriented?
Then, when the server is down, the client can migrate its data to a new server.
Trust is not evil as long as its verifiable at the same time.
I just wrote a 600 line function and I feel so good about it. It’s clean, clear, structural. The logic falls through. It’s just so goddamn nice! It’s never about how short your code is. It’s always about how clear it is.
Finally, after almost a year, I implemented the local pin protection for your private key. https://blowater.app 
No browser as it is, will soon become the blocker and bottleneck for decentralized internet and technologies. Without context, you are confused I’m sure.
https://github.com/BlowaterNostr/blowater/pull/372
NIP44 has been integrated into Blowater. DM security should be better now.
I am very serious about engineering quality. NIP44 has been integrated to nostr.ts and Blowater app will integrate after UI/UX design changes. 
So what happens to nip7 now nip44 is out?
The development is still going, just not very active on social media.
What’s the first guard and guard passing you first developed that’s much better than other positions as a white belt. For me it’s half guard and passing from half guard. I suck at any open guard and today I seriously realized that I don’t know closed guard at all and I pretty much don’t know butterfly. I plan to practice more butterfly and closed guard in the coming quarter. I also need to do more strength training to just protect my joins.
Blocking has been implemented. Not synced across devices yet. 
My client does not even appeal to myself at this point LOL nostr:note1sqfrdvv3d89fa53ak5rrcauwdezzlwhck0ye7dcf6dtl7shyygcq49adv0
Happy New Year
One thing I have been doing after NostrAsia is to learn from people in non-internet industries such as filmmaking, fashion and more. Nostr developers are pretty much all from software industry. The problem is that software industry by itself is basically controlled by big platforms and they have absolutely no incentives to adopt the decentralized model. It’s very hard to win in their home court. Therefore, it’s very hard to migrate/onboard new users from these platforms.
However, other traditional industries don’t care about your technology solutions, it’s a better battle field for decentralization to win.
This is just my hypothesis and maybe decentralization can win there. I will use 2024 to verify.
Not a Nostr client?
It’s about software engineering. I once fall into the trap of trying to solve problems out of my real goal and over generalizing which always led to worse code and slower production.
Just design the thing that fits the actual goal and only do the thing. Reducing the space of potential complexity.