So I have a totally different perspective on this. I do not believe that moderated communities on nostr are 'censorship'. On the contrary, I think that independently-governed spaces are (and will increasingly become) one of the most important tools we have in the fight *against* censorship.
I will explain how I came to that conclusion, but first let me try to steelman what I think you're saying.
Reddit has obviously been crippled by censorship. Like, it's is basically a psyop at this point. So I 100% agree with you that if nostr communities are implemented in the same way that reddit communities are implemented, nostr will, sooner or later, slide down the path of becoming censorious and irrelevant just like reddit.
So why do I think sub-communities on nostr will *not* lead to censorship?
It comes down to nostr's architecture. The fact is, all data on nostr is public and uncensorable by default because notes are signed and distributed redundantly across multiple relays. Therefore, on it's not possible for the mod of a nostr community to delete your post or ban you without everyone knowing. Unlike reddit, mod actions on nostr are 100% transparent, and mods are therefore accountable for the actions they take. Satellite's interface displays a *public modqueue* for every nostr community. Mods are replaceable because communities are forkable.
I'm sure you'd agree that it's necessary to delete spam, right? If there isn't some mechanism in place to delete spam, every feed in every community would be 100% ads. Right now we're all relying on relays to fight the spam battle, but that won't work forever. This leads me back to my point about why I think communities on nostr are actually a way to prevent censorship.
Censorship prevents communication. One way of preventing communication is by silencing people. Denying people the ability to speak. Signal *blocking*.
What's less obvious is that another way to censor people is by signal *jamming*. They way you do that is by increasing the noise. Imagine trying to be heard in a room of a thousand people all shouting at the top of their lungs.
It comes down to signal/noise ratio. Whether you reduce the signal or increase the noise, the result is the same.
Nostr already does a relatively good job defending against signal blocking, but we're still vulnerable to signal jamming in the form of unmitigated spam and potentially even AI-powered psyops. My viewpoint is that communities (transparently curated and moderated by humans) are how we scale nostr while making it *more* censorship-resistant.
I'm the developer of Satellite (I just pushed and update with these nostr communities yesterday). I want to avoid this being something that divides nostr. If you disagree with my reasoning I want to understand why. View quoted note →
