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This is not censorship resistant. Relays are external points of centralization. For all intents and purposes, they are federated service providers -- central se
by rabite 5y ago
This is not censorship resistant. Relays are external points of centralization. For all intents and purposes, they are federated service providers -- central services that can deplatform users by simply choosing not to syndicate their messages. Over time this will result in all relays being compromised by state adversaries. Legitimate "free speech" relays will be removed from the internet via ddos, legal complaints, and just general nuisance complaints that the SPLC and other organizations excel in. Both domain names, ARIN/RIPE/etc IP assignments, and BGP peering relationships are historically subject to revocation via a loud chorus of complainers when the speakers are politically unpersoned. Original nodes will then be replaced with adversarial ones -- sometimes on the same now-reassigned IPs or domain names that were taken from the original operators.
This could be reasonably censorship resistant if the first place people checked for the updates of users they follow was a hidden service that is innate to every client. Ricochet Refresh and Bisq are great models of this -- every messenger or trader client launches a local daemon accessible only by a hidden service that corresponds as its identity. Any kind of relay or pub system needs to be an offline-only gossip protocol that is only checked if the publisher's hidden service is inaccessible.
Secondly, this just does not scale, at all. The twitter firehouse is petabytes of content a day. If even a single city adopted this and used it like people do Twitter, running relays would be a financially and logistically significant enterprise. This is obviously nonviable. There are great ways for lowering the cost of UGC, namely serving it on some sort of DHT. You could use BitTorrent, or you could use IPFS. You are using neither, which means you haven't done basic napkin math on what being a Twitter alternative would mean.
But basically a real useful and actually decentralized and censorship resistant protocol would not be dependent on pubs or relays. If you want to contribute to something in development which actually has a viable model, I recommend Identia: https://github.com/iohzrd/identia https://github.com/iohzrd/identia
This proposed service has not confronted a single one of the actual problems of censorship or centralization in the subset of social media. You maybe should actually talk with people who have done significant anti-censorship work and ask them what the actual problems are and what needs to be done to solve them.
- Ambolia 5y ago>This is not censorship resistant I think the good thing about Nostr is that all the network / account / content seems to be stored in the data, not on the servers, so if the relays become a problem at some point it would be trivial to add new channels to distribute the data. >Secondly, this just does not scale, at all I think it does very nicely, in the sense that because the network IS in the data you could have different relays only distributing some of the data for some of the users and by connecting to different relays you could still rebuild the complete conversations in your client. This also solves one of the annoying things of modern internet: when a video or an article gets taken down all of the websites that reference it get a broken link that is very difficult to recover. This is one of the reasons many accounts respond to screenshots of tweets rather that no tweets. With something like Nostr should be easier to recreate all the references in a post as long as at least 1 person has archived them.
- fiatjaf 5y agoHonestly, it's ridiculous that you claim that this basic client-server architecture "does not scale at all" and then proceed to recommend IPFS or "some sort of DHT", which are the things that were never tested at scale and theoretically cannot scale and will not scale past some thousands of users or tracked resources -- ever. It's also ridiculous that you cite attacks at the infrastructure level that were not used to censor anyone so far -- because censorship happens always at a much higher level -- and then you just proceed to recommend an IPFS solution that is also subject to attacks at the infrastructure level, because everything is!
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago> Both domain names, ARIN/RIPE/etc IP assignments, and BGP peering relationships are historically subject to revocation via a loud chorus of complainers when the speakers are politically unpersoned. Do you have any examples of this? The only deplatforming I'm familiar with is the removal of accounts from websites, though yes that may include a cloud provider's website. I'm not familiar with any IP address related or BGP based filtering by any actor that isn't nation-state funded (for which a system like Tor is necessary.) There's also the GNU Name System as a DHT based domain name system.