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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

#91

Post by radford-neal »

logic_beats_pro wrote: post #17
zapataband1 wrote: post #6

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…

I think there is a need for "censorship" (if you want to call it that), but not for the reason the other people replying to this comment say.

Do you really want to censor racist comments, for instance? Wouldn't you rather know how many racists there are out there?

The real problem is possible use of a channel like this to support bad actions, not bad viewpoints. For example, someone could advertise to hire a hit-man to kill someone. Or a group might use the channel to organize a mob to go around burning down jewish businesses.

In the scheme described, owners of individual servers could block such messages, if they recognize they're there (a possibly hard problem). Perhaps this would be sufficient, while still leaving viewpoints uncensored, since there are, we hope, very few people in favour of serious criminal activity, while many favour free speech even for those they detest.

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

#92

Post by antris »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #88
antris wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If pointing out that having an audience is a central need for people who use social media, makes me "love censorship", then you are delusional.

What makes you "love censorship" is making insinuations about anyone who "crys about censorship". As you yourself pointed out, neither RSS nor nostr do anything to help people find an audience, so this is completely irrelevant to the question of how these things compare.

> What makes you "love censorship" is making insinuations about anyone who "crys about censorship".

Ok. So still delusional. Have a good day.

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

#93

Post by heyitsguay »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #32
logic_beats_pro wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Censorship is a given for large online platforms. You can and should try to allow free propagation of ideas, but you also have to protect the forum from people who are determined to fill it with hateful commentary and pornography. 4chan isn’t a crazy special case, it’s the default destination of a forum where everyone knows there are no rules.

In particular, it used to be called "forum moderation" until that was deliberately conflated with censorship by far-right groups, angry at their loss of audience, starting I guess somewhere around 2010.

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

#94

Post by haunter »

ss108 wrote: post #56

So a platform whose where any idiot can spout any garbage and they feel expressly empowered to do so? No thanks. Granted, there seems to be no censorship on Hacker News. :thinking:

>Granted, there seems to be no censorship on Hacker News

follow the site through RSS and you can see a huge amount of flagged, dead/removed posts

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

#95

Post by josephcsible »

heyitsguay wrote: post #93
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censorship is a given for large online platforms. You can and should try to allow free propagation of ideas, but you also have to protect the forum from people who are determined to fill it with hateful commentary and pornography. 4chan isn’t a crazy special case, it’s the default destination of a forum where everyone knows there are no rules.

In particular, it used to be called "forum moderation" until that was deliberately conflated with censorship by far-right groups, angry at their loss of audience, starting I guess somewhere around 2010.

The equivalent of "forum moderation" is removal of content by Facebook group owners, or subreddit moderators. Censorship at the scale Big Tech does today would be equivalent to the vBulletin developers baking admin backdoors into the software so that they could censor other people's instances of it.

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

#96

Post by rabite »

This is not censorship resistant. Relays are external points of centralization. For all intents and purposes, they are federated service providers -- central services that can deplatform users by simply choosing not to syndicate their messages. Over time this will result in all relays being compromised by state adversaries. Legitimate "free speech" relays will be removed from the internet via ddos, legal complaints, and just general nuisance complaints that the SPLC and other organizations excel in. Both domain names, ARIN/RIPE/etc IP assignments, and BGP peering relationships are historically subject to revocation via a loud chorus of complainers when the speakers are politically unpersoned. Original nodes will then be replaced with adversarial ones -- sometimes on the same now-reassigned IPs or domain names that were taken from the original operators.

This could be reasonably censorship resistant if the first place people checked for the updates of users they follow was a hidden service that is innate to every client. Ricochet Refresh and Bisq are great models of this -- every messenger or trader client launches a local daemon accessible only by a hidden service that corresponds as its identity. Any kind of relay or pub system needs to be an offline-only gossip protocol that is only checked if the publisher's hidden service is inaccessible.

Secondly, this just does not scale, at all. The twitter firehouse is petabytes of content a day. If even a single city adopted this and used it like people do Twitter, running relays would be a financially and logistically significant enterprise. This is obviously nonviable. There are great ways for lowering the cost of UGC, namely serving it on some sort of DHT. You could use BitTorrent, or you could use IPFS. You are using neither, which means you haven't done basic napkin math on what being a Twitter alternative would mean.

But basically a real useful and actually decentralized and censorship resistant protocol would not be dependent on pubs or relays. If you want to contribute to something in development which actually has a viable model, I recommend Identia: https://github.com/iohzrd/identia

This proposed service has not confronted a single one of the actual problems of censorship or centralization in the subset of social media. You maybe should actually talk with people who have done significant anti-censorship work and ask them what the actual problems are and what needs to be done to solve them.

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

#97

Post by krapp »

josephcsible wrote: post #95
heyitsguay wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In particular, it used to be called "forum moderation" until that was deliberately conflated with censorship by far-right groups, angry at their loss of audience, starting I guess somewhere around 2010.

The equivalent of "forum moderation" is removal of content by Facebook group owners, or subreddit moderators. Censorship at the scale Big Tech does today would be equivalent to the vBulletin developers baking admin backdoors into the software so that they could censor other people's instances of it.

> Censorship at the scale Big Tech does today would be equivalent to the vBulletin developers baking admin backdoors into the software so that they could censor other people's instances of it.

No it wouldn't. As big as Facebook is, they still only moderate their own platform, and there is only one instance of Facebook. Separate vBulletin instances do not constitute a single, collective "vBulletin platform." The narrative of "Big Tech" as an organized leftist conspiracy orchestrating censorship over all social media is simply right-wing propaganda.

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

#98

Post by Ambolia »

supertestnet wrote: post #85
Ambolia wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can see you subscribe to specific authors, not to a global feed on the relay, an the author is identified by their cryptographic key. Not sure how it allows you to find new people or responses to comments. Seems like it should be a key part.

Peer discovery and peer suggestions are not implemented yet. People have been posting their public keys on twitter etc. There is a proposal for encoding a set of followers/followed in a message which your followers' clients can then use to display info about that on your profile. That should help with peer discovery once someone codes it up. You can also find threads that people are widely commenting on (e.g. someone…

It's not so much peer discovery, rather the nice thing about Twitter compared with a newsletter or a blog is that you get a post and different people responding and interacting with it.

I guess some level of interaction will be needed to replicate the things people look for in Twitter. I guess a very basic functionality that that would cover this would be posting in your timeline "responses" to other posts by including the key of the other author and the cryptographic signature of the post. From that a client would be able to obtain the "parent" post and build a thread.

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

#99

Post by josephcsible »

krapp wrote: post #97
josephcsible wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The equivalent of "forum moderation" is removal of content by Facebook group owners, or subreddit moderators. Censorship at the scale Big Tech does today would be equivalent to the vBulletin developers baking admin backdoors into the software so that they could censor other people's instances of it.

> Censorship at the scale Big Tech does today would be equivalent to the vBulletin developers baking admin backdoors into the software so that they could censor other people's instances of it. No it wouldn't. As big as Facebook is, they still only moderate their own platform, and there is only one instance of Facebook. Separate vBulletin instances do not constitute a single, collective "vBulletin platform." The narra…

> there is only one instance of Facebook.

That's my point. The reason vBulletin forum moderators aren't equivalent to Big Tech censorship is that you can run your own vBulletin, independent of theirs. Censorship of Facebook is bad because that isn't an option.

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

#100

Post by gaws »

marstall wrote: post #52
JulianMorrison wrote: post #48

Banning people is an upside. Setting boundaries of acceptable behaviour is necessary for having a space where people won't be troll-brigaded and hate-swarmed, and where the worst people on the internet don't drive out everyone else.

exactly. when I see "censorship-resistant," I hear "we don't have a way to control abuse on this platform."

When I see "censorship-resistant," I read "I can call someone the n-word and not get banned for it."
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