Jack Dorsey explains very concisely how Nostr works in 2 minutes
One of the best descriptions I’ve seen. No fluff, no technical jargon. Why Jack left X and Bluesky, was because he wanted a social platform that was also going to be censorship free. The Nostr design depends on numerous hosted relays, and there is/a ...continues
See https://gadgeteer.co.za/jack-dorsey-explains-very-concisely-how-nostr-works-in-2-minutes/
@danie10 It's kind of unfortunate he isn't right on a lot of areas.
You don't own the data as you would if you had a fediverse instance. The data lives an the server and at that point it is out of your control.
It is worse when it comes to keeping out bots like AI than a mastodon instance with manual signups.
When it comes from free speech nostr is worse. The government can more easily firewall and track down critics with Nostr than with activity pub.
@Sibshops well 2 points there are not right:
Posts replicate through numerous relays in various countries. To block you all those individual relays would have to conspire together.
Remember post belong on a single mastodon server and that admin can delete your account and those posts, and a government has to just block that one server to block you. Hubzilla may be better with its nomadic account profiles than Mastodon is.
How would a gov firewall over 200 relays vs one Mastodon server?
@danie10 If the government wants to find you they just have to compromise one of the 200 relays, instead of a single server.
It makes it easier to track someone down and arrest them.
@Sibshops no, your app sets WHICH relays you use by default so it can't be any one of the 200+ relays. But govs have access to telco's so can find any of its own citizens quite easily, way more accurately than a VPN'd IP addresses. That said, relatively speaking it is still easier to target a single Mastodon server that is used I think. Nothing online is truly private tho, even Bitcoin can be traced.
@danie10 I'm just saying it would be harder for the government to find who is posting something with an overseas server than with nostr's many clients.
Mastodon has a commitment to keeping user's identity private. For example, they automatically strip all identifying information like image metadata when posting with "map_metadata -1".
If you want to avoid corporate censorship, nostr is better, but for government censorship, I don't think nostr helps.