Haha, followed so I don't make the same mistake again

Any mention of the deluge of spam? Consider using the spam to determine what relays are still accessible behind the firewall 🥳 Fun fact: Taiwan VPS's are mostly unblocked to mainland Chinese users. Always happy to rebroadcast notes from across the Strait 🤓

Yeah, I had noticed the huge amounts of spam when I manually searched, but actually the method I used seem to only return posts that seemed genuine. Unless the spam has evolved to the point where I failed the Turing test numerous times lol

The Chinese spam is rather unique, haven't seen spam of the same caliber 😏 porn or e-commerce spam seem to be the most popular flavors Honestly wonder why that is, don't see it in any other language. -- My head canon is Chinese users actively testing "can I really post this?" But Occam's razor tells me it's probably some middle aged pervert or SEO-junkie instead who got bored.

The porn thing is sus lol. or it seemed sus, I think on X or other places, someone would drown out critical hashtags with pornbots. I think now the government understands that the play is to empower a bunch of TikTokers with well-established followings to make videos etc. but who knows who is really doing all these things. Maybe it is just some SEO-junkie lol and my conspiracy hivemind needs to simplify.

I used to think that the brigading of politically sensitive posts must only be coordinated by paid actors (the colloquial term is 五毛) because how could anyone with a shred of decency actively ruin public discourse. (I.e. HK protests 2019) .... But the fact is indecent people use the internet too and outrage marketing is lucrative 🫠 When the state gets involved, they explicitly make their presence known with violence, follower counts don't mean much when they can just wipe people from existence (digitally or physically). Consider Jack Ma

yeah fair point, and I do think there are a lot more 小粉 than 五毛 these days

Sign of the times, increased reliance on the nanny state 🥲 can't increase social credit any other way It's a shame really, when times were "good" the Chinese internet was pretty entertaining with how users conducted themselves with their own internet slang to get around the censors, now that times are "bad" they don't even bother. It's a drastic shift even from an outsider looking in. Can't expect much from those who protest on their knees 🫠

I still remember the days when we were "too simple, sometimes naive"

I assume they expect to overwhelm the authoritarian machine in China. Will that work? If anything has the chance, it's the freedom tech, right? But will it work?

Not sure about that, everybody has their different reasons, but it sounds like Nostr is funner and has more privacy (no identifier to sign up)