One thing I’d take issue with is the BlueSky example. Users did not flock there because they were being censored on X and needed something permission-less; they flocked there because they had LOST the power to censor others on X and wanted it back for themselves. The promise they see in BlueSky is not greater freedom, but that their faction has enough concentration of power to limit the freedom of others. So there’s no mystery as to why they didn’t turn to this platform. It’s everything they didn’t want.
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If anyone thinks that I’m just being partisan about this, please realize that when BlueSky started to blow up big, everyone was reporting each other‘s posts over ideological impurity, so much so that the system couldn’t even keep up with it.
They did not go there to escape censorship. They went there to inflict it .
I use Bluesky time to time because it's the only place on the internet I can subscribe to an algorithmic twitter-style feed about the Godot game engine. It's either there or nowhere, so I guess it's there.
That’s a very good point.
And I agree with you in general.
That being said…
1. It doesn’t really answer why (one of) the biggest increases in BlueSky user growth happened when X was banned in Brazil (not sure wtf explain that tbh 😂).
2. I still don’t think “censorship resistance” is an appealing enough narrative to create a meaningful enough network effect. That doesn’t mean censorship resistance shouldn’t be “baked into” Nostr as a standard (IMO that’s SUPER important), but I don’t think it’s going to appeal to a lot of people outside of whoever is mostly already here & gets it.
I think we need to Trojan horse it into larger audiences via other means.
Or who knows - maybe we shouldn’t even talk about it at all?
I’m not sure what the exact solution is. Still experimenting
The few times I have been there I have been censored. So I am not so sure this is so. X itself will censor. They seem to have something against certain words like "cisgender". Both times I used that word in a post I got limited visibility notice.
