So…I don’t know how to tell you this, but we, here, the tiny handful of us using Nostr might be the only people in the entire world who care about free speech enough to want to protect it.
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I'm here for that 🤙
Also because algos are boring me out
We are caretaking the free speech platform while we await the genpop to arrive and ruin it.
And they will if they ever do. Maybe we don’t want mainstream adoption.
Who is this "we".
That’s why we’re here right?
So I'm in good company!
Nope! 99.9% of users here are connected to centralized relays, leaving them vulnerable to censorship! Also most of the relays are on AWS!
We also seem to be the only ones who realize that most of our societal institutions are corrupt and not likely salvageable, so we're creating new systems to go around them.
- Bitcoin to most is 'just' a new money-thing, investment thing or whatever
- Nostr to most is 'just' a different X or Facebook or something
How many people have any idea we're trying to save our entire civilization?
How many realize how close we are to a dystopian technocracy?
We are decades into it already.
🫡
I don't think that holds up, but it does attract people who are like this for sure. Nostr has an issue where mentioning it on for example a youtube comment will get the comment instantly censored so it has limited reach in onboarding.
That’s irrelevant TBH, and only reinforces the reason why Nostr needs to exist.
Its not irrelevant, it means there may be more people out there who would love to be here but simply have not discovered it yet. And I'd say that can be a substantial group of new users. Especially users who may find their current platform fine but would jump ship if censored.
Take Twitter for example, twitter in foreign languages can be less censored due to lack of moderators. So dutch people have not adopted Nostr at all even if they care about free speech because to them Twitter genuinely is the free speech platform at the moment.
But yes, Nostr needs to exist and get more adoption (And prepare against the spam waves new adoption will attract). Its one of the few long term solutions against the ever increasing censorship.
All nine of us 🤙
Don’t worry, the AI content police will fix that soon enough.
Yup, and I have been recommending it to people since the UK thing which also sparked my interest in the platform.
We need real solutions that can't be censored easily and this platform is one of the best I saw.
12. Come on.
We should start out own country.
1) care about free speech
2) are bored by and want to avoid algos
3) do know about Nostr and how to get in the flow successfully
4) are comfortable being aside of the actual fights
5) can take the constant bitcoin preaching here
We are truly the remnant.
I believe there are a lot more. But a big part don't know nostr, and an even bigger part isn't that much into technology.
If you are connected to a single relay, sure, but aren't most users connected to multiple?
And that’s enough
Majorities are not required
There's a big difference between freedom from state censorship and freedom from censorship on private property or on a private platform.
Announce your position in a public forum in the USA and there are many organizations who will sink thousands of dollars into making sure you beat anyone who sues you.
Additionally, Nostr users care about their OWN freedom of speech. Just being on Nostr doesn't inherently protect other people's right to freedom of speech .
Most of the relays are on hosted services.
The handful is tiny because nostr's architecture is some sort of kiddie joke and won't scale to any meaningful proportions.
How are we protecting free speech exactly?
By writing BITCOIN MOON every day?
Ahh…busted! 
That’s what they say. I remember when it would never be possible to stream video on the internet, too.
Cool cool yo know if you had an understanding of these things you'd know how the one is different from the other.
Why are you here then, since your presence adds no value?
the potential scale of nostr is way more than any centralized, silo'd architecture.
Few..
i like nostr
It’s like saying Lightning can’t scale as well as a blockchain. Complete lack of understanding of what true scalability means.
to be fair this guy spends all of his posts shitting on literally everything. sad human being.
It blows my mind the number of people that use platforms they seem to hate in order to get attention. Imagine a world where we could funnel all that energy into doing something good…
No it isn't. Centralized architectures are centralized not because a Bond villain in his lair wants a stranglehold on your communication but because they are the most efficient. Brittle maybe, but efficient. There's only one possible path that any message can take from spoke to spoke and it's via the hub.
Any other architecture computational power and bandwidth has to be spent on discovering a path first and it grows exponentially with the number of hops required.
Sounds like he’s living his best Nostr life! 🤣
Free speech. A tiny amount of free speech what with the tiny scale of nostr but enough to irk people.
this like saying the internet would be more scalable if done through a single company. retarded take
It would be, most certainly. It would also be more brittle but that's not the aspect OP was addressing.
obviously we are using a different definition of scalable. have the entire internet go down at once is not a desirable property at scale
It's not desirable, no. Nostr has no chance of scaling up and not become brittle.
scale.
the siren song of the short sighted corporatist and politician.
Please elaborate, why can’t it scale? It’s handling its user base well so far. At what point do you think its limit will be reached?
Are you taking hardware limitation, software limitation….?
hating is easy, building is hard, why do you think so many people want communism, sorry, I meant "democratic socialism"
Yes, so are a great many Tor nodes. The point isn't that relays can't be taken down, the point is that ACCOUNTS can't be taken down. The point of decentralized trust is that instead of agonizing over how robust and trustworthy an individual relay is, you can just add more and more diverse relays until you are comfortable.
I can back up my notes and rebroadcast them, and no one can revoke my ability to do this.
Exactly. I find it frustrating when people nitpick the reliability of individual components in a system designed to have layers of redundancy. I don't understand why people do that. Are they just too used to thinking about systems without redundancy, like ActivityPub or like VPNs?
It’s like when someone is trying to argue with me about bitcoin…
“Well the government can just shut off the internet.”
And when I say that won’t stop it…
“Well they can just shut down the electrical grid.”
It’s all so tiresome.
If the internet is didabled then within 24 hours the TikTok users will overthrow the government. Why do you think Donald Trump fought so hard to keep TikTok available?
Tor is designed to anonymize relay operator and partially mitigate the problem, but not sufficient to scale. See we only have a few of them and they barely work and those that work are well known and easy to trace: https://github.com/0xtrr/onion-service-nostr-relays.
Don’t forget that notes are stored on relays and relays are not obligated to keep your data. That makes accounts vulnerable. Let’s come back to censorship problem. Here’s a practical scenario: a relay operator logs your IP, a government obtains a warrant, the operator hands over the logs, and law enforcement knocking your doors. That’s why people in highly repressive countries like North Korea and China avoid using nostr. Now imagine a more aggressive attack: arrest one of the largest, well-known relay operators to set a legal precedent. Even well-resourced relays would likely unplug to avoid liability, leaving the network unusable which leads to: no incentive to host a relay if it risks jail time. People forget what happened when Snowden joined Nostr and shared it on Twitter. So relays struggled to scale and nostr was unusable. The only way to make Nostr truly censorship-resistant at scale is to decentralise relay functionality into clients. If clients run embedded relays (on phones or laptops), store data locally, and route through Tor, censorship and legal pressure against single relay operators become far less effective.
I’m brand new, just learning this, but I feel a ‘calm’ here (if that makes sense), almost like you’re all real people, not bots and targeted ad algorithms. I found Nostr through an Ian Carrol video.
I’m interested to see the ways I can lean into Nostr, and away from the big apps.
Might be true. 🤔
Welcome! And interesting that you should mention @npub1xr7t...2gqh, who himself did not understand Nostr enough to see the value in it. He dropped in and left after a couple of weeks back in January. That’s the problem with these bullshit influencer types with a million plus followers on centralized platforms. They’re addicted to feeling of being internet famous. I knew he would never last here. None of them do. (That’s a feature, not a bug!)
I am just follow along . Censorship exist whereas govt exist . It doesn’t matter right or left .
Run your own relay over tor! If you have Android you can do a great set up: Orbot+Citrix
Sad, but somewhat true.
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Of course
When you hit it with enough raw bandwidth, it probably can
I mean there are so many algorithms to find the shortest path
For nostr, there are many possibilities like using local relays to offload the traffic and then forward the necessary data to remote relays. It uses web socket reduces latency and optimal for real time communication.
Not true at all, for example bittorrent scale very well as users increases the uplink also increases, centralised servers can get bandwidth exhausted very fast and lacks redundancy if the network is down.
Of course they would want to censor promoting nostr
Directionally correct, but I think thats like saying bitcoiners in 2010 were the only ones who care enough about sound money. We are still early on nostr and many out there will want to use it but either don’t know about it or aren’t nerdy/autistic/anarchistic enough to start using it yet.
I brought up the design of Tor as an analogy for the design of Nostr. It's irritating that you only considered how Tor can be used for Nostr rather than the general design of Tor itself, but I'd rather drop the topic than try to spell out the analogy better.
You are right that if a Nostr user's privacy is compromised, that can be leveraged in order to censor their speech. It doesn't matter how many relays are willing to publish a person's notes if the person in question is being imprisoned and physically prevented from posting those notes.
However there are many existing privacy technologies that can be applied here. The most robust protections focus on protecting the user rather than the relay. Why agonize over finding a relay owner who will resist torture to keep your IP address when you can just avoid giving them your IP address in the first place?
Personally I use a VPN because it's easy and convenient, but there's no reason a person couldn't send notes to Nostr relays over Tor or I2P or from a burner phone in a remote field. If privacy is the issue then there are lots of options, but if the issue is finding a Nostr relay that you know for sure is trustworthy, then you have no options at all.
Dumb analogy. Tor and Nostr relays differ significantly in design and operation. Tor relays route encrypted, transient traffic through circuits for anonymity, with no data storage. Nostr relays store and broadcast persistent, plaintext notes, acting like federated databases. Tor hides who communicates, nostr ensures what is shared survives.
Tor and Nostr have one fundamental trait in common: redundancy. Nothing else matters for my analogy. Any system making use redundancy is worse off when the user or designer of that system attempts to distil the available components to only the most robust and reliable. Reducing the number of components can never make the system harder to break, no matter how high quality and well selected the remaining components are.
Trying to find and select only the best relays is a complete waste of time, just like trying to prevent people from running Tor nodes unless you are confident they aren't keeping logs. They are identical in the way that matters.
Yeah for now. Some are still not aware of Nostr.
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Bet we on a list somewhere
Hello my Agents! 👋
🥹
I’m just here because I like obscure shit tbh.
Mostly used the Fediverse prior to this but as more folks came from X I lost interest.
Maybe the same will happen here… Peak internet for me was a forum with 20 bellends posting regularly.
We up to 9 now?!? Shhhhiiiiiieeeettt.
People feel free until they hit the barriers of their cage
Now it's 'only' 10%
We few, we happy few, we band of autist coders, meme lords, and freetards!
Frens for freedom!
normies will join when get kicked from other easy2use digital prisons
This is why I am here.
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#2 🔥 Community Highlights
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1. Bitcoin plebs, this Revolution.Social episode would be really interested for you
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2. Actually, why are you on Nostr?
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3. This is the truth that everyone should understand
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4. When you use Nostr and other social media, you realize the preciousness of Nostr
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5. This is the progress we need in Nostr
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6. How much plebs love Nostr
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7. A request of a Nostr Bitcoiner from the Nostr community
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8. Nostr has answers for many problems
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9. What do you think about this?
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10. Nostr word spreads to the world step by step
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11. Both are correct
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12. Yeah for now; some are still not aware of Nostr
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13. The family vlog with the new cute member
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#community_nostr_recap
😩
Let's together buy some island and move there together.