Becoming another Twitter

Do they still claim to be decentralized? What kind of idiot can buy their narrative?

This is a pretty well-researched account of what happened, both the good and the bad. Sadly you won't find many even lightly-researched takes of this here on nostr.

fediversereport.com

Bluesky, censorship and country-based moderation

This week, Bluesky hid accounts in for users in Turkey after a government order. I take a closer look at government censorship and ATProto, how geo...

Depends what you mean by "Bluesky". Those accounts hidden by bsky.app are still accessible in Turkey via at least 3 other atproto clients. This is a good summary of the nuts and bolts.

fediversereport.com

Bluesky, censorship and country-based moderation

This week, Bluesky hid accounts in for users in Turkey after a government order. I take a closer look at government censorship and ATProto, how geo...

I’d love to strap @rabble into a chair, peg his eyes open, and make him witness all the instances of Governments going after dissidents because of the tools people like him built. “Left libertarian” my ballsack. You’re an idiot who doesn’t understand the true nature of systems and power, and refuses to listen to people who do because they’re not leftists like you.

Needing articles like this to explain moderation turns their main value prop (censorship resistance) into a burden. Twitter-clone land suffers from a similar issue. You can be censored sure, but you the who, how and when people see/interact with your publications needs manual books right now. For me, Interop walled gardens is the main value prop. Niche walled gardens that can each have their own rules, pricing, recommended apps, servers and global state + can cooperate (or not). With no profile or publications chained to any of them. Besides Nostr I don't know of any other protocol that lets me build that.

Are you suggesting nostr would somehow be more resistant in cases like these?

For Twitter-clones nope. For #communikeys totally.

Nostr doesnt by default have a bunch of moderation tools. That’s something @rabble took it upon himself to build on #nostr and deploy because apparently his ilk of queers need safe spaces where they can appeal to authorities to have people shut out of broadcasting their messages if their pronouns aren’t respected. Either he didn’t learn a single fucking thing in his years at Twitter (and he was there for the Arab Spring - literal OG shit where the world saw how powerful social media could be), or he’s a Fed trying to poison pill the Nostr protocol. It matters not at this point because the result is the same. He should be rejected by everyone on Nostr for trying to subvert the protocol. I’m sick of playing nice towards these cunts. They ruin everything and we’re all supposed to pretend like they didn’t mean it because they didn’t make their FBI credentials into their PFP. The purpose of a system is what is does. The purpose of Rabble is what he does. What he does is undermine the best of Nostr ostensibly because his blue haired friends need to be able to report others to authorities so the State can come down on them whilst they all share kiddie porn in peace. Fuck him.

What are these protocol-subverting/poison-pill moderation tools?

I started reading and stopped at Bluesky PBC. What is your take? It seems like an insanely long explanation for something so simple.

My take is it's pretty much the same as what would happen to Nostr there, if Nostr weren't so small. Right now these "banned" bluesky accounts can be accessed in Turkey by at least 3 or 4 other bluesky clients (atproto clients), including iOS, Android and web. And probably several more. But that's because the Turkish government sees these other clients as inconsequential. The key point is governments these days are far more tech-savvy than they used to be. Nostr would be no more resistant to the censoring efforts of a tech-savvy government than atproto, or farcaster, or pubky, or keet, or anything else provided it were big enough. All would be trivially easy for that government to make useless for the majority of its population. In a week. When talking of censorship resistance it's only really meaningful if talking about resistance to in-house censorship. To in-house moderation teams. Anything on the government side—that's a fever dream in 2025. If you're big enough or sensitive enough to be deemed necessary to censor then you're censored.

Please describe the steps the Turkish government would take to censor a Nostr user.

1 identify user 2 imprison

It's a nice padded place for people who hate Elon to hang out. Other than that, nothing.

If we're imagining a future where nostr is quite big then Country X (it could be one of many) would likely go after the protocol ecosystem in general. But anyway: 1. Request larger app clients remove access to the person in question for users in that country. 2. Request Apple remove Damus and Primal from the App store (assuming neither complies, and assuming other clients like Nostur are far enough off the radar) 3. Request Google remove Amethyst and Primal from Play (same assumption) 4. Firewall off domains of the top10 or 20 relays (even 5 would likely cause enough chaos, assuming the degree of relay clumping in this imaginary future is as high as it is now.) 5. If wanting to go the extra mile ask relay domain extension companies to revoke domain ownership for TOS violations (they're sure to find *something*), and for a few larger relay domains. For example .mom, .lol, .band, .wine... these domains are all administered by private companies that have their own terms on top of ICANN's, and if you read those terms you'll see what I mean. (This is why you've got archive.ph and archive.md and not archive.mom or archive.lol -- certain cctlds are less proactive). 6. Firewall off access to Nostr.build and any other large media host. 7. Contact any third-party CDN being used by larger media hosts (Akamai, Fastly, etc.) with similar stop-serving-for-this-geo requests 8. Firewall off access to web domains of popular web clients. 9. Whatever else is needed. Or in whatever other order. Adjust country by country. How many of these steps would be needed? Maybe just a few would make nostr pretty much unusable for most quite-unquote normal users in the country, and you'd imagine that's often the goal.

You can argue that Bluesky censorship is happening at the client level today, but I'm not sure that's what the Turkish government thinks. Once they understand it they might ask for a server-side censorship, and then Bluesky won't have any chances. They might realize that once users start migrating to alternative clients. If that happens that will be a good sign that censoring clients directly isn't a good idea, so the weakest point of Nostr will actually prove to not be that weak after all. Still I think we need more client diversity (even though we actually have plenty) and I think we will get that over time.

I agree that nostr needs more diversity. There are plenty of clients (Jumble is solid) but as for usage Primal seems pretty dominant. Odell the other day mentioned Primal has 10k daily actives, and nostr.band at that time had around 16k daily trusted pubkeys. Assuming most of the 10k Odell mentioned would be considered trusted pubkeys in nostr.band's accounting then maybe over half of all nostr usage currently comes via Primal? I guess no way to be sure, but that feels about right. You can sense it with this buzzbot thing. That is very much a byproduct of Primal trending. So Primal's quasi-global view and the features it enables are also influencing nostr culture quite a bit.

One-feed UX trends towards centralization and total depravity. Communities and private groups (can finally!!) trend towards decentralization and less vice.