You say "don't just randomly choose" People will naturally choose what the authorities market the hardest, even worse than random choice And you're expecting them to do better than random choice without a system to help with it. You're wrong People will naturally gravitate to a small number of apps based on what other people are using and if those apps aren't standardized to report on each other's behavior, they'll barely notice when those apps start sabotaging the network If more nodes are suddenly becoming what would be tags 3 and 5, but there's no tagging system to automatically stop relying on those nodes, 𝙤𝙧 𝙖𝙩 𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙨𝙩 𝙩𝙤 𝙝𝙚𝙡𝙥 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙪𝙨𝙚𝙧 𝙢𝙖𝙣𝙖𝙜𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩, then people won't even notice someone's posts being filtered until it's been months since they heard from that person. This is like how on the current version of nostr, there's no P2P data integrity verification, so people don't even notice someone's posts being filtered until it's been a long time since they heard from that person. Network nodes aren't just people

If they delegate their choice to the authorities, they are going to be slaves forever. Regardless of how much the protocol tries to protect them. You don't need nostr to be a sheep. And nostr can't block you from being a sheep.

Seems a little sensationalized, tbh. Relays can be scraped without content, so I don’t what difference does it make?

Some relays can literally sell information like when you are connected, from which IPs and thus locations, what searches do you make and which posts are you looking at in real time. Lots of companies buy that information.