Expecting a normal user to notice the differential between Primal’s Nostr feed and the one on the network is not realistic. So is expecting a normal person to tinker with settings, know what a caching server is and knowing how to locate and replace it. Whatever the default is, that’s the setting that is staying for virtually all users except a tiny fringe forever.
It seems to me that Primal is repeating the essential problem with federation that Nostr was solving in the first place. In a federated system censorship becomes trivial because ever since conversation goes through gmail.com or bsky.app — the concentration of large numbers of people on a single server creates perverse incentives over time. If Nostr ever becomes popular and the most popular client is reliant on a single caching server, the operator will be ordered by courts, domain registrars and registries, CDNs, BGP peers, and app stores to filter it. Or the board will just elect new people who are censorship friendly because it is the only way to be commercially viable and get ads that pay well.
Replies (3)
the caching server setting is Primal's warrant canary.
if they add a "bypass caching server, connect directly to relays" setting i'll be much more convinced they are good actors. and if it ever disappears thereafter, i'll know they've been captured.
...if they refuse to add it to begin with, i'll have no way to know which one it is, and i'll have to assume the worst. this is a healthy sort of pressure in a decentralized ecosystem.
i was similarly obnoxious about nsec sign-in, and to their credit they did ultimately add Amber login and i give them credit for that. this issue can simply go the same way and everyone will be happy
This is a resonable ask.
Countless examples all over legacy social media of people screenshotting and comparing each others' google results, news site promoted content, twitter and facebook feeds and posts - that whole pile of shit is exactly the mess that we're finally able to escape from.
Adding potentially-malicious and non-bypassable caching servers in between sources of truth and users eyeballs goes in precisely the opposite direction, right back into that mess.
