Welcome Ian, and new people that followed you to Nostr. Hopefully this series of short quirky videos will make some things click, especially some of the nuances around censorship. This is the mission: The core notion of censorship resistance, i.e. retaining your following: View quoted note → Breaking free from the silos, and having everything tied to your unique name: View quoted note → Nostr is pro-censorship, and that is a good thing: View quoted note → And all of this allows for a whole new web, if, we manage to build it correctly: View quoted note →

He just likes to pirate material and put it on dwindeling platforms to taunt them.

The dumb part is about the type of queries you send towards a relay; the point is that you should be able to ask any relay the same type of question. Or put the other way, a client (or a feature rather) should not depend on some special sauce server/relay side in order to work, because that means 'lock-in' and undermines/destroyes the whole Nostr model. Now wether a relay cooperates (i.e. what policies it employs for accepting these simple/dumb requests/queries) is a different matter. Actually it is precisely BECAUSE the relays are supposed to be "dumb", we have this situation where relays can deploy whatever arbitrary 'censorship' without causing (fundamental) problems, because you as a user can move over to another relay. Its the "dumb relay" idea that allows for the censorship resistance; and as a result provides freedom of association. Hope this clarifies

The recent article on some fediverse drama clearly shows their model is fundamentally broken. Three quotes: "Freedom of association is one of the valuable features of the fediverse." "Servers defederating from each other can have significant impact on users, who suddenly can lose connections with their friends." "The users who are transferring from Fosstodon to another server will lose their posts; Mastodon does only transfer the social graph, and not posting history." So in this fediverse, their freedom of association comes at a price; either you give up your posting history and maintain your social graph, or you suffer damage to your social graph and maintain your posting history. Hopefully the video below explains why there is no reason for any of this, Nostr.

fediversereport.com

Fediverse Report – #114

Instance drama, with some reflection on how federation could be improved on the fediverse.

See also:

Is there any thinking person who thinks Nostr isn't much better than the fediverse at this point? Or Bluesky? Or X? They just happen to have a little more network effect.

''neutral carrier'' is just another political position, and as such dependent on political conviction (for example expressed by law); protocols would do well not to depend on such things. View quoted note →