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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

#131

Post by vidarh »

webmaven wrote: post #129
vidarh wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only true if you choose to introduce a global namespace. There's nothing requiring you to have just a single such catalog of users as long as the canonical reference is the pubkey any more than the contact list on my phone requires you to name people the same on your phone. (and in fact on reading the protocol specs, they do have a way for relays to publish mappings [1] . EDIT: and that would seem to make it p…

Sure, you can have multiple namespaces, and each would have to be censored, but that's about as difficult as playing whack-a-mole with multiple domains pointed at an IP address.

If you can censor the catalogs you can censor the relays. Not least because the protocols allows the relays to serve up catalogs of name to pubkey mappings. Having this lookup functionality makes no difference at all to the ability to censor. If you have an issue with the censorship resistance of this you have an issue with the core concept of this project.

That's fine. But it's entirely independent of whether or not you provide a lookup mechanism for names.

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

#132

Post by vidarh »

webmaven wrote: post #130
fiatjaf wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you don't. You can have DNS-based aliases to pubkeys, and then people will follow pubkeys and interact with pubkeys, not with the DNS aliases. So if these users are censored later from the DNS then they still keep their identity, their contacts, their followers etc.

That's kind of like saying that people don't interact with domain names, but with IP addresses. The point of having the mapping of a name to a key is for users to use it in place of the underlying key in their interactions with the system.

Missing the point, which is that the lookup doesn't need to function or be available for anyone but the person composing the message at the time they compose it. It can be entirely private, entirely public, or a mix. What gets transmitted is the pubkey. Optionally the relay can provide a mapping, which may be globally consistent or entirely based in some private mapping.

Users just need a catalog which includes the keys of people they care about. The relays can backfill this information. You have little reason to know mappings for users whose messages you're not seeing, and if the messages are not censored the mappings won't be either.

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

#134

Post by perryizgr8 »

sour-taste wrote: post #79
beebmam wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censorship is certainly necessary on some level. Child sexual abuse material, for example. Animal brutality material, rape/snuff material, and so on. I do NOT want this stuff shown to me, ever, and I don't want anyone else in society to have access to this material ever. Even just a short exposure to these things can be life traumatizing to people, as it has been to me. Racism/sexism is a lot murkier of a topic. Ther…

> Even just a short exposure to these things can be life traumatizing to people, as it has been to me +1. When I was younger I used to browse 4chan somewhat regularly. I saw snuff videos and other awful content that I still think about to this day. My life would have been better had I not seen it.

My life would have been way better if I had 1 million dollars at birth. Let's restructure society and sacrifice everybody's fundamental liberties to ensure a better life for me.

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

#135

Post by sour-taste »

floober wrote: post #8

> It insists on having a chain of updates from a single user, which feels unnecessary to me and something that adds bloat and rigidity to the thing — each server/user needs to store all the chain of posts to be sure the new one is valid. Why? (Maybe they have a good reason); I assume this is so a relay can't manipulate your messaging by picking and choosing which messages to forward; they'd have to forward messages […

I'm not associated with this project in any way, but your comment got me curious. It seems that since each message is signed with the private key even if you were able to perform an extension attack (which I agree it seems like you would be able to) you wouldn't be able to sign the message so it should be rejected by the relay. The signature is based on the message ID, which itself is the SHA256 of the rest of the message so by doing an extension you necessarily change the SHA256, which should invalidate the signature.

But I'm an idiot so who knows.

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

#136

Post by Ambolia »

0xdeadb00f wrote: post #133

Mastodon, Pleroma, MissKey, the "Fediverse", all already exist. Set up your own instance - there you have it - censorship resistant Twitter clone.

In this case the content and accounts are independent of the node. In Mastodon as far as I can see both the account and the content are instance dependent and will disappear if the instance disappears.

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

#137

Post by Ambolia »

rabite wrote: post #96

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,…

>This is not censorship resistant

I think the good thing about Nostr is that all the network / account / content seems to be stored in the data, not on the servers, so if the relays become a problem at some point it would be trivial to add new channels to distribute the data.

>Secondly, this just does not scale, at all

I think it does very nicely, in the sense that because the network IS in the data you could have different relays only distributing some of the data for some of the users and by connecting to different relays you could still rebuild the complete conversations in your client.

This also solves one of the annoying things of modern internet: when a video or an article gets taken down all of the websites that reference it get a broken link that is very difficult to recover. This is one of the reasons many accounts respond to screenshots of tweets rather that no tweets.

With something like Nostr should be easier to recreate all the references in a post as long as at least 1 person has archived them.

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

#138

Post by hffft »

endymi0n wrote: post #15

I used to be a huge fan of censorship resistance, freedom and privacy, but I didn‘t appreciate just how much self-selection there was in the kinds of people who went to great lengths to access IRC in the times of dial-up modems. These days, I have the feeling there are only two kinds of platforms left: The clean ones with strong moderation, where any form of edginess and possibly controversial topics including breast…

"And the other ones, where the Nazis, lunatics and scammers hang out.

I‘m still not sure what to take from that. "

Probably because the Nazis, etc have been pushed off the mainstream networks and had to find alternatives and the rest of the people didn't and those new/smaller networks haven't been required to censor yet.

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

#139

Post by kseistrup »

swalsh wrote: post #60
Cameri wrote: 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!

Just checked it out, my pub key is f0bed2e11260f0f77f781db928f40a34c18713fda1918d3be996f91d0776e985 it's not obvious to me though how you find people to follow.

Lack of discoverability is often a weak spot of decentralized social networks that don't have a public firehose. Secure Scuttlebutt, Twtxt, Bogbook — and now Nostr — all suffer from this, and new users end up looking at an empty timeline and shouting into the dark.

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

#140

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

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…

If I'm running a relay, and there's a possibility that somebody who dislikes me can upload something questionable and use it to make the cops show up at my house and make off with my computers... Well that's content that I'd like to censor.

I'm not taking a stand against the content itself, but as long as there are bullies that can be moved to action by bits on a disk, our protocols will need to either support censorship, of be zero-knowledge to the point where nobody knows which bits are on which disks.

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