Well it's pretty obvious why, don't you think

Out of curiosity, why not use bitchat, or white noise? 🤔

Nostr is funny sometimes

How you can compare Telegram features and ease of use with Bitchat? Same for whitenoise. It's very hard to teach people how to use them. They lack features and most people prefer smooth UI and experience instead of a just working (?) app that nobody use. Most of them use TG channels as source of news, buying VPNs, online shop, sharing daily life and more. It lets them to have a full control over permission levels like who see what, and more. It's a universe of features, in a super simple UI that Iranian people are familiar with and using it for over 10 years now. Also Signal and other similar apps are not that much used. People hate WhatsApp here for example.

I'm not going to say TG is a freedom tech. But I don't think they are working with the govet. Never seen someone being accused from private TG data as evidence or clue. But if you look closely. There is centralized Telegram server which is banned. Then people can simply spin up proxies and share. Running a new proxy is not hard. So people and teams start doing scripts that spin up proxies per minute. And there is a ton of proxies. So there is a high chance for you to be able to connect to one of them. Proxies are not servers, they are just connecting to the same server/network using them and I won't lose my data, still consistent. But in case of Nostr, Matrix, and... Someone have to run a server/relay which is not as simple as a proxy, it needs a database. So it leads to less relays and servers compared to proxies. And if you can't connect to it, you even can't use the previous data! Or you can't simply move to a new IP they banned it. Also I guess detection and banning of a proxy specifically for an app, is harder to detect a general purpose VPN. And some clients also don't follow the added relay list, like Primal. It's same as X. Nothing different. Or Amy, which weirdly can't connect to a relay that I can use with NAK on the same network! Which makes it worse. In this situation, with highly censored internet in Iran, connecting to TG is much easier than Nostr or Matrix. So, by forcing clients to senstively follow the user added relays and creating some sort of proxy for relays, we could reach a better point to make Nostr really censorship-resistant.