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Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter

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Re: Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter

#21
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another nitpick this -> "A relay can block a user from publishing anything there, " sounds like censorship to me We need to realize our problem is not with censoring people, it's with who does the censoring. We don't like it to be the gov, because we don't feel like the gov is 'by and for the people' We don't like it being large corporations because that's doubly the case.

> A relay can block a user from publishing anything there. The point is that it won’t be effective since messages are pushed to/pulled from multiple relays.

Unless relays come together and agree to block someone or something. As long as there are enough relays this is improbable

Re: Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter

#22
Censorship is not that big of a problem in this age. That exact info will be available on someone’s server God knows where. Hell, moderation is very fundamental so any project not thinking about that is prone to fail due to low-quality/illegal content, driving away intelligent users.

Obstructing the truth by misinformation, spamming, etc is the actual problem. It is a much more effective way to target uncomfortable infos. During one of the Russian elections, voter fraud was caught on camera and was uploaded to Twitter, with #villageName. It quickly caught on and censoring was impossible at that point - so Russian bots instead started spamming #villageName posts with no sane content so anyone clicking on the hashtag to learn what happened was left wondering.

Re: Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter

#23
post #3

I'm using branle ( https://branle.fiatjaf.com/ ) as my client and you can follow me with my pubkey: 22e804d26ed16b68db5259e78449e96dab5d464c8f470bda3eb1a70467f2c793. You can find my pubring on my bio after following me. There's no ability to discover others at this time! Nostr relay registry hosted here ( https://nostr-registry.netlify.app ) by fiatjaf. Exciting times!

> I'm using branle ( https://branle.fiatjaf.com/ ) as my client and you can follow me with my pubkey: 22e804d26ed16b68db5259e78449e96dab5d464c8f470bda3eb1a70467f2c793. It isn't too hard to improve upon the status quo in various ways when you just drop a key usability requirement (in this case, the need for human-memorable 'handles'). It is worth reading 'Why Johnny Can't Encrypt' (1999) [0], 'Why Johnny Still Can't E…

That's true, but you can disconnect those requirements on the server side.

E.g. a "name/profile to key/value" service would be useful for more than this.

If people want mastodon style handles, for example, it's easy enough to create a mapping that can leverage DNS for example to let you query for a matching pubkey in a cacheable and easily scalable way and without the need for that to be built into the messaging protocol.

Re: Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter

#24
post #11

For me the fact that it's censorship-resistant is not the interesting point here, it's that it's decentralized.

It's not decentralized yet but only potentially decentralized if a lot of people run relays. Currently there are only about seven relays powering the whole network: https://nostr-registry.netlify.app/

Luckily, relays are very lightweight and easy to run so maybe it will eventually get decentralized.

Re: Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another nitpick this -> "A relay can block a user from publishing anything there, " sounds like censorship to me We need to realize our problem is not with censoring people, it's with who does the censoring. We don't like it to be the gov, because we don't feel like the gov is 'by and for the people' We don't like it being large corporations because that's doubly the case.

>We need to realize our problem is not with censoring people, it's with who does the censoring. No, the problem is with censoring people. You make it seem like censorship is a given. I disagree and feel no need to have a third party prune unwanted ideas for me. This will seem like a strange idea for some but I don't need a priest in between myself and God. I don't need a doctor in between myself and good health. Why…

> No, the problem is with censoring people.

No, it’s who/when/where the censorship occurs.

If you want to come into my living room and shout Nazi propaganda, your ass is getting censored and banned from my house.

If you think that level of censorship is a problem, then we have a fundamental disagreement, and the bad news for you is 95% of people will disagree with you.

If you agree on that level of censorship, then we’re just arguing where the who/when/where line should be.

Re: Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter

#27
post #22

Censorship is not that big of a problem in this age. That exact info will be available on someone’s server God knows where. Hell, moderation is very fundamental so any project not thinking about that is prone to fail due to low-quality/illegal content, driving away intelligent users. Obstructing the truth by misinformation, spamming, etc is the actual problem. It is a much more effective way to target uncomfortable i…

Agreed. What we need is a 21st century web of trust for reliability of information. This way those you trust could help you find others you trust. And if somebody you trust starts to trust people you don't, you can cut them out of your news sources. This might even be a way to validate trust in anonymous sources, without leaking their identity. Just, please, no more keysharing parties.

Re: Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter

#29
post #3

I'm using branle ( https://branle.fiatjaf.com/ ) as my client and you can follow me with my pubkey: 22e804d26ed16b68db5259e78449e96dab5d464c8f470bda3eb1a70467f2c793. You can find my pubring on my bio after following me. There's no ability to discover others at this time! Nostr relay registry hosted here ( https://nostr-registry.netlify.app ) by fiatjaf. Exciting times!

If ed25519 was used instead of secp256k1, wouldn't pubkeys be shorter? Like SSB.

Re: Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter

#30

I like the intent of these types of projects but a serious question I have is: How do you get the majority of people to switch to something like this? There are many examples but the most recent ones that come to mind are people trying to get their friends to use Murmur/Mumble instead of Discord with basically near-zero success. I've seen this in a few gaming forums. Anyone attempting this is basically laughed off th…

Be the unreasonable minority https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
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