Dikaios1517 on Nostr: As ChipTuner pointed out, censorship resistant does not mean censorship immune. TL;DR ...

As ChipTuner (nprofile…rq9f) pointed out, censorship resistant does not mean censorship immune.

TL;DR - Nostr is censorship resistant, even against state actors, due to effective strategies readily available to mitigate their efforts to take down content or even whole sets of relays. However, when we talk about censorship resistance, we are usually comparing Nostr's decentralization and redundancy of content across multiple relays to the actions often taken by centralized social media platforms to easily ban or shadow ban users who say things they don't like.

"If feds raid all 5 relays..."

That's an interesting thought experiment, actually. Let's think through what that would mean.

If the feds were raiding the relays of one specific Nostr user, that would mean he has been posting things that are a significant enough threat to the government's authority that it would be worth their effort to see to it that everything he has said on Nostr is taken offline.

Presumably, if he was aware that his posts might incite such a reaction from the feds, he would have taken measures to ensure that they would have difficulty achieving a total takedown of all the relays he uses. He would use relays that are in various jurisdictions around the world, not all of which are friendly to the US. He would also be posting to more relays than are listed in his relay list—not merely relying on "posts that got replicated by other relays"—either by use of a blastr relay, or via a client that allows for automatically posting to relays that aren't in a user's relay list. There are also services that allow users to periodically broadcast all of their notes out to all known relays. That way, if all the relays in his list did manage to get raided at once, the only thing he would need to do is publish a new relay list pointing to some of the other relays that already have his notes on them, and it would be as though nothing had happened.

Contrary to your assumption, his profile would not "become empty in most clients," because many clients look for profiles not only on the relays a user specifies that they are writing to, but also on indexer relays, so it would only become entirely empty if all his write relays and all the indexer relays were taken down, and the latter would probably not be the case if the feds were targeting him in particular.

Either way, though, as long as he has intentionally been posting to other relays that he hasn't advertised, all it takes is broadcasting a new version of his relay list with a few of those relays on it and its as though the raid of his previously listed relays never happened. It would be much more effective for the feds to just go and arrest him, if they actually have cause that would hold up in court, rather than try to play whack-a-mole with his relays.

Things are a bit different if we assume the feds aren't targeting a specific user, but are targeting Nostr in general. There are currently almost 1,500 known Nostr relays. Certainly, a large portion of those are just running on AWS, and it would take little effort for the feds to get them taken down. However, a large number are also running on various VPS servers around the world, and even on personal hardware in users' homes via reverse proxy, so it would take quite the effort to raid all of them, especially ones that are outside of US jurisdiction, and it would not happen all at once. As soon as the community was aware that such raids on Nostr relay operators were taking place, they would be 1. Sounding the alarm about such a brazen attack on free speech, and 2. Taking steps to spin up relays that are more difficult to locate and take down. Suddenly every Nostr client would integrate Tor, as a few already have, and most relays would be served through Tor .onion addresses rather than clearnet.

I'd be very interested to see how such an all-out attack on Nostr would actually shake out, but I doubt it would ever happen. Specific public relays or public Blossom servers might get taken down for failing to take adequate steps to remove anything that is actually illegal, such as CSAM, but an all-out effort to take down every Nostr relay in existence? Doubtful. Your post seemed to assume that other Nostr relays would still be up and running after the raid, so I am guessing you were speaking of a raid targeting a specific user's relays, rather than all of Nostr, anyway.

"Now you could have a neat archive with all of your events ready to be rebroadcast to any set of relays... but at that point this level of preparedness isn't a feature of Nostr nor would it uniquely benefit Nostr, because if you have such an archive you could just as well deploy it in full to a fresh account on any other social media platform, no matter how censorious it is."

I am not sure what you are getting at here. Do Facebook, or Twitter, or any of the other centralized social media platforms typically allow you to have your posts mirrored to your own personal archive in real time, or do you have to ask them for the privilege of downloading them? When you start a new account with any of those platforms, do they typically have a tool available to readily upload your archive of posts into your new account, with the appropriate timestamps? Is there any single platform you can name that would allow the upload of a database of Nostr posts? Moreover, assuming the user in question was uploading his posts to a new account because his Nostr relays were raided by the feds, how long do you think he would last on that centralized platform before he was banned from there, too? If he was enough of a threat that the feds raided his Nostr relays, I would assume he must have built up a following here. If he creates a new account somewhere else, will he still have that following, or will he have to rebuild, hoping to somehow get the word out to those who were following him on Nostr to let them know where they can now find his content?

Even if he was short-sighted enough to only post to the relays he was advertising in his relay list, and his only method of recovery was to try and find his notes on relays that aggregated them, or rebroadcast from a private archive relay he kept, that's still a major benefit of Nostr. It may not be a benefit TO Nostr, as you mentioned, since he could take that archive and start an account somewhere else, but it was Nostr that made it easy for him to have an archive that was updated in real time as he posted in the first place. No centralized social media platforms that I am aware of have the ability to easily do that. So, even in that situation, I expect he would stick with Nostr, because he can readily mirror his archive of notes to a new set of relays here, using any number of tools made for that purpose, publish a new relay list, and not have to rebuild his follower base somewhere else that doesn't have the same recovery tools.

With that specific thought experiment concluded, we can move on to what we mean by censorship resistance on Nostr. We are not usually talking about state actors making a forceful and concerted effort to take down a particular user's notes. That type of censorship is actually quite rare. The US government typically achieves censorship by means of sending takedown requests to social media companies asking them to remove users' offending posts, which certainly could happen with Nostr relays, since the vast majority of them use standard DNS, so their owners are known via DNS registration records. However, how effective that type of request would be when made to relay owners, rather than large corporations, is questionable. This is especially the case, given the example above of a user easily being able to mirror an archive of their notes to new relays, update their relay list, and thus completely nullify the takedown requests, even assuming all all relay operators who received them complied. When their takedown requests are ignored, government agencies may move to more serious non-violent means of turning it into a demand rather than a request, such as subpoenas and court orders, but even these are far less common, because they require a court to agree that the content should be taken down. Again, there is a benefit to using relays in various jurisdictions if you are going to be posting content that you know or even suspect will bring negative attention from a particular government.

Actual raids on server infrastructure for decentralized social media are exceptionally rare. I could only find one documented case, and it was a Mastodon server that was geared toward anarchist leftist content. Though the server hardware was seized, the instance itself remained online because other admins of the server had backups. In this example, because of Mastodon's particular federated homeserver architecture, the government officials probably assumed the raid would be effective, since the content they wanted to take down presumably only existed on that single server. The cost/benefit of doing a single raid to take down the offending content of multiple users was worth it. Of course, they were wrong, because backups of that server existed and it was quickly back online. Nostr is a completely different cost/benefit equation, since they would have to do multiple raids to take down a single user's content, and even that may not be effective if that user has been posting to other relays they haven't advertised in their relay list, or other relays have been aggregating their notes.

When we talk about censorship resistance on Nostr, we are usually comparing it to the ability of a centralized platform to unilaterally prevent a user from posting (hard ban), or keep his posts from being seen by other users (shadow ban). Nostr is even more resistant to this type of censorship than it is to state-actor censorship. While a relay may ban a user from posting to it, that isn't very effective since a user can just post to other relays that haven't banned them and update their relay list. Likewise, though a client may shadow ban a user by not surfacing their notes to users of that client, those who want to see that user's notes can just use a different client. As long as there are multiple popular clients that make different decisions about whether they will shadow ban anyone, and if so what criteria they will use, then there will always be clients available to peruse the type of content you want to see.