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Fiat Revelation Fiatrevelation@stacker.news 1 year ago
Gm Nostriches πŸͺΆ Elon Musk is bending to Brazil’s censorship demands. Pavel Durov is bending to French government. Freedom of expression is being compromised by illegal authoritarian governments’ holding these CEOs and their assets hostage. Can relay operators be similarly coerced? What are the choke points in the Nostr protocol? Does the BITCOIN IS SPEECH argument help in protecting freedom of expression on Nostr? #asknostr #freedomofexpression #bitcoinisspeech #grownostr

Replies (32)

Big Barry Bitcoin's avatar
Big Barry Bitcoin BigBarryBitcoin@Nostr-Check.com 1 year ago
#Nostr has no CEO. No one can bend om behalf of Nostr. CEOs had massive power and and they have learned that this power has strings. Users hopefully will finally understand that creating your own notes, signing them with your own keys and posting them to your own servers is the ultimate win. But with the first two, you win massively using relays either way. Slowly then suddenly. The weak point if any is the relays. We need to keep building to bring the cost of running a relay so low that anyone can do it, if approached, anyone can quit or exit and everyone else will be just fine. I am still very bullish on Nostr.
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Big Barry Bitcoin's avatar
Big Barry Bitcoin BigBarryBitcoin@Nostr-Check.com 1 year ago
The first 2 points put the data in control of the user. A relay has little power to censor you, they have no ability to ban or block you in any meaningful way, no way of stopping you from seeing content outside of their relay, and their relay is a tiny fraction of #Nostr.
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Fiat Revelation Fiatrevelation@stacker.news 1 year ago
Thanks for the reply, Fiatjaf. I’m somewhat new in this space so I’m trying to figure out some of the mechanics. Indulge me - if you will - few more curiosities: If users flock to popular relays to achieve maximal reach, and operators can be coerced, then doesn’t that obfuscate decentralization? I’m finding that relay discovery is a barrier of entry to Nostr from a user perspective (not a dev, if that wasn’t already obvious). Do you have any suggestions for us plebs who want to filter relays by area of interest?
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PABLOF7z's avatar
PABLOF7z _@f7z.io 1 year ago
no, that's exactly what the outbox model is, and the clients your followers use need to use it; that's why we insist on its importance so much; it (or something like it) is the only way nostr can become decentralized
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fiatjaf's avatar
fiatjaf _@fiatjaf.com 1 year ago
We don't have many relays with filtered content yet, today all relays are all more or less the same mess, but if you are into cats here is something for you: You can use https://nostrrr.com/relay/catstrr.swarmstr.com to browse.
pitiunited's avatar pitiunited
CATSTRR - a nostr relay that only accepts notes with cat pictures 😸 wss://catstrr.swarmstr.com Powered by khatru framework by @fiatjaf Uses facebook/detr-resnet-50 for object detection. Feedback/suggestions (future relay ideas) appreciated. Source: https://github.com/ptrio42/catstrr
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Fiat Revelation Fiatrevelation@stacker.news 1 year ago
I appreciate the visualization. (FYI - At first I got the same "view on desktop" note as @π•Ύπ–Šπ–— π•Ύπ–‘π–Šπ–Šπ–•π–ž (on a laptop). Zooming out fixed this.) Thanks for this. I've found Nostrudle works nicely for discovering user inbox/outbox relays. Haven't been able to see other user's relay info on the mobile clients (Damus, Primal), which is where sharing them to your followers would come into play. I guess growing one's reach is better done using traditional/centralized channels for communication for now. However, I can see how the outbox model can give you more control over the content you are seeing, if you only connect to paid relays, for instance, you will the proof of work takes care of spam users.
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Valentino Giudice aspie96@Nostr-Check.com 1 year ago
Nostr is not resistant to government censorship, only corporate censorship, which is a lot of the ongoing online censorship, so that already makes the project important. To maximize resistance to corporate censorship, however, we need, ideally, free relays which free speech policies that do not censor what they do not need to, so as to maximize freedom of speech. Relays can remove anything. I think, ideally, we should have relays run by non-profit organizations with freedom of speech as a goal.
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Valentino Giudice aspie96@Nostr-Check.com 1 year ago
Also: > Does the BITCOIN IS SPEECH argument help in protecting freedom of expression on Nostr? No. Nostr isn't Bitcoin. Nothing about Bitcoin will help anything about Nostr.
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