https://relay.brightbolt.net/1fa94ab52a32544c5ee8ae550b30ba9fb612e504d0d797f0dcdaf6d5d83f606a.mp3
quoting
naddr1qv…n8emI have seen a lot of "#Nostr isn't actually censorship resistant" posts lately. It's nothing new. There has always been a bit of it in the past in various forms, and it is generally those same forms that are still repeated:
"Nostr isn't censorship resistant, because my posts are all hidden on Primal."
"...because Amethyst covers my posts with a warning for users whose follows have reported me too many times."
"...because the feds could raid the 5 relays you are using and your posts would all disappear."
"...because relays can blacklist you so you can't post to them anymore."
"...because Web-of-Trust keeps new users' posts from being seen by anyone."
Every one of these supposed evidences that Nostr isn't actually censorship resistant demonstrates ignorance about what that really means, and how it works on Nostr as compared with centralized, legacy social media, or even other attempts at decentralization, like Mastodon.
The Censorship Status Quo
If your account gets banned on Facebook, that's it, you're done. You have to start over and hope you can get everyone who was following your old account to follow your new one. If your post on X gets taken down for violating community standards, there is no third party X client where it will still be visible to people. If you get shadow banned on TikTok so that the algorithm never surfaces your content, there is no alternative app you can point your followers to where they can choose a different algorithm that will show them your videos again.
These platforms are siloes where a single company controls the client applications and/or web interfaces, the user data stored on their servers, who can create an account, and how their posts will be (or won't be) shown to other users. If they take censorious actions against you as a user, your only recourse is to beg them to reverse it, and if they refuse then you are out of luck. That, my friends, is actual censorship, since the unilateral actions of one controlling entity can prevent your speech from being seen by any and all users of that platform.
Even on Mastodon, if you anger the admin of your home instance, they can ban you and you have to start over with a new identity. Your previous social graph does not go with you. A deletion request is also sent to other instances, and most of them will comply with it by deleting your posts. So, even though the ability to censor is spread between various instances, it is trivial for a single entity to effectively censor you if you get on their bad side.
On Nostr, all of these censorship vectors are mitigated, if not outright eliminated. Censorship resistance means that more individuals or entities would need to collude with one another to effectively keep a user's speech from being seen by most or all other users. Let's see how that works in practice by looking at some of the specific claims that Nostr is not actually censorship resistant.
Censorship by Nostr Client Devs
"Nostr isn't actually censorship resistant, because my posts are all hidden on Primal."
One client may decide to completely hide the posts made by a particular npub. There is no system I can imagine where this level of censorship cannot take place. If you rely on an a piece of software created by someone else in order to see content from other users, the developer of that software will always have the ability to hide posts they don't want you to see for one reason or another. Nostr is not censorship resistant because it can somehow prevent software developers from hiding the posts of users they don't like. There is no way to prevent that while maintaining a fixed public key as your identity so that other users can reliably follow your posts.
If every post you made was from a new public key, then it really would be impossible to target you specifically for censorship, and some Nostr clients can do exactly that with an "anon mode" toggle, such as Coracle or Anonostr, but that also precludes you from building a following, since no one knows what public key you will be posting from next, and as soon as there is a way to determine what key you will be posting from, client developers will also have a way to hide your posts again.
Nostr's censorship resistance in this situation is owing to the fact that if one client hides your posts, they are still visible on every other Nostr client without any action requred on your part. Your posts are not censored to the same degree as they would have been on a centralized platform, since one client developer's actions do not result in your speech being hidden from most or all Nostr users. Your speech is being suppressed, but that suppression is nowhere near as effective as it would be if one entity controlled all of Nostr. Thus, Nostr is more resistant to that suppression of your speech than would have been the case elsewhere.
This fact also tends to keep clients from getting ban-happy and censoring absolutely every npub that has said something unkind about them. There's really no point in doing so, since those users' notes will still be visible on every other Nostr client. Therefore, the only npubs that tend to get censored are those that the client devs believe will negatively impact the experience of their users. They may be wrong in that assessment, but they have the right to make it, and if you don't like it, the answer is quite simple: Use a different client, and encourage your followers to do the same if they aren't already. As you do, don't forget to note that this option in itself would never be available to you on centralized social media platforms. Your account would be completely useless and you would have to start over from scratch.
Censorship by User Reports
"Nostr isn't actually censorship resistant, because Amethyst covers my posts with a warning for users whose follows have reported me too many times."
What was said above about a single client hiding a particular user's posts from other users is equally applicable here. Though you might be able to call it a form of censorship by speech suppression, it is not at all censorship to the degree that centralized platforms are capable of, since it only applies to those who use that particular client, and users of other clients will still see your posts without the need for you to take any action.
In this particular example, though, what is being called censorship is not really censorship at all. The client developer is not targeting the speech of any user or group of users for suppression whatsoever. The posts that are covered with a warning, and whether any posts get covered at all, is determined entirely by the users themselves, and it is different for each individual user based on who they are following and who those follows have reported. That's not censorship. That's user-controlled feed curation with a sensible default that can be adjusted to the user's preference.
It might be legitimate to classify it as censorship if the user wasn't aware that any post had been hidden. For the user to reasonably be considered in control of what posts they see, they must be aware that there are posts that are not being shown to them. In this case, the client does show the user a warning message in the place of the hidden note, with an explanation of why it was hidden, and the user can immediately choose to show it anyway if they prefer. In no sense can this be reasonably characterized as censorship.
Censorship by State Actors
"Nostr isn't actually censorship resistant, because the feds could raid the 5 relays you are using and your posts would all disappear."
There are many ways in which this example of Nostr's supposed lack of censorship resistance is just silly. Nevertheless, I wanted to include it not only because I have actually encountered it in the wild, but because it provides an opportunity to discuss ways that users can proactively prevent themselves from being censored, even in this extremely hypothetical instance.
First, if the feds, or some other interested party, decided that the best way to keep your speech from being seen on Nostr was to physically raid the relays you set on your relay list and take them offline, it is unlikely that this would make your posts disappear from Nostr entirely. First of all, there are various other relays that aggregate notes from known relays, and your notes would almost certainly be available on some of them. Any users reading from those aggregators would still see your previous notes.
Second, you can post your notes to more relays than you are advertising in your relay list. Several clients give you this option natively, such as Nostur and Nostrudel. You can also set a blastr relay, like wss://filter.nostr.wine, as one of your write relays, and every time you post a new note, it will be sent to several additional relays that are not advertised in your relay list. That way, if all of your preferred relays go down for any reason, fed raid or otherwise, all you need to do is publish a new relay list that includes a few of the relays where your notes were blasted, and you are back in business like nothing happened.
Third, you can keep a private backup of your notes and easily broadcast them to more relays any time you want, using tools like NostrSync or Archivestr. You can even do this on a regular basis, if you don't want to set up a blastr relay. None of this requires any special hardware. Just go to one of these tools' websites, create an archive of your notes pulled from the relays you are currently writing to, and then broadcast it out to several additional relays. Then make note of which relays you broadcasted to, so you can switch to them in the event your current relays are no longer online.
If you really are concerned that a government entity would be so threatened by your speech that they would resort to raiding the servers hosting your notes, then I hope you have really solid op-sec, because the most effective way to shut down your speech is to find you, not the relays you write to. Aside from that, it is also a good idea to select relays that are not located in the same jurisdiction. Choose relays that are in different countries, and even better if those countries are not always cooperative with one another.
Censorship by Relay Operators
"Nostr isn't actually censorship resistant, because relays can blacklist you so you can't post to them anymore."
This is very similar to the contention that a particular Nostr client can hide your posts from their users. Yes, a particular relay operator can prevent you from posting to their relay. That's not censorship, though. It is their relay to do with as they please. After all, you are not being censored because there are relays that only allow people who have paid the operator to post to them, are you? You are not being censored because some relays only allow those within a certain social group to post to them, are you? No. You can still use any number of public relays that allow anyone to post to them. If they choose to ban you, then you can just switch to using different ones. There are nearly 1,500 known relays to choose from that you can peruse at Nostr.Watch, so one relay, or even a sizeable percentage of relays, banning you has absolutely no impact on whether your notes will be seen. Just update your relay list to some relays that haven't banned you and keep on posting.
This is why nostr does not use home instances or homeservers like Mastodon. That makes you beholden to one particular server admin who has the power to unilaterally ban you. Relay operators can't do that, because your identity is not intrinsically tied to a particular relay.
Better yet, if you are really convinced that a majority of relay operators would be so offended by what you have to say that they would all ban you, you can run your own relay. Yes, this requires a bit of technical know-how, but that is part of the cost of being nearly universally offensive online. Moreover, there are tools like Nostr Relay Tray that make it incredibly easy to run a personal relay that others can read from via clearnet without exposing your home IP.
Censorship Via Web-of-Trust Filters
"Nostr isn't actually censorship resistant, because Web-of-Trust keeps new users' posts from being seen by anyone."
I am sympathetic to this argument, because while Web-of-Trust (WoT) is very effective at keeping spam from showing up in my feed, it also can keep posts from legitimate new users from showing up until they have managed to get a few followers. Depending on how reliant the bulk of Nostr users are on WoT to curate their feeds and their replies, it could make it incredibly difficult for new users to gain any traction, leaving them feeling like they are shouting into the void, until they finally leave because the only response they got back was from a bunch of bots.
That said, I am not aware of any WoT filters that are turned on by default. The end user has to manually opt-into using WoT to curate what they see. This takes WoT definitively out of the category of censorship, since it is not imposed by any client upon their users, but is entirely an optional means for users themselves to decide what content they want to see.
There are two main ways that WoT can be implemented for the purpose of limiting what posts a user sees in their feed. The first is by a Nostr client that shows posts or replies only from within the user's WoT. If I recall correctly, this was originally used by Coracle and Primal to expand the number of notes that users would see in their feed, rather than reduce them, because the default feeds only showed notes from a user's follows, but WoT allowed notes to be displayed from within a user's "network." Coracle iterated on this to develop client-side WoT scores that were unique to each user's view, and they could limit the feed and replies to only display notes from users who met a minimum WoT score set by the user. Jumble implemented the ability to filter based on WoT just for replies, since that is where the most obnoxious spam typically occurs, leaving no filtering on original posts. But all of these filters, regardless of client, have been opt-in only, leaving it in the user's hands to determine whether to take advantage of the feature.
The second way WoT has commonly been implemented is by relays. In this case, a relay can be set up with a whitelist of users who are permitted to post to it based on the relay owner's WoT. This relay type was particularly popular before clients were fetching notes directly from the relays in a user's follows' relay lists in what is known as the outbox model. Back then, Nostr clients would only read notes from the specific relays the user listed as "read" relays, so they could easily reduce spam by only reading from paid relays and WoT relays. That doesn't apply so much today, but even if it did, the choice to use a WoT relay is one made by each individual user. It is not imposed upon users, and therefore it cannot be legitimately be classified as censorship.
Conclusion
In summary, many of the supposed examples of censorship still being possible on Nostr don't really count as censorship at all, because they are not examples of some authority like a client developer targeting specific posts, users, or topics they don't like and hiding them from their users without their knowledge and without any simple recourse. Most are actually 100% in the control of users themselves to determine what they do and do not see in their feeds. These tools are absolutely essential for users to have at their disposal, and we need to see more such tools implemented in other clients, so that users have the ability to curate their experience in accord with their own preferences.
Those ways that actual suppression of speech is still possible on Nostr are greatly mitigated by the flexibility users have to choose between a wide variety of different clients and relays. If one client censors you, it doesn't really matter so long as there are still a number of other popular clients where your notes can still be seen. Yes, this means that some level of censorship can occur and is occurring on Nostr, but it is far less effective than it would be on any centralized platform. This severe reduction in the effectiveness of any effort at censorship is all that is meant when we say that Nostr is censorship resistant. We do not mean that the ability to censor particular users or groups of users is eliminated entirely. That is actually impossible to achieve.
It is my opinion that Nostr has proven itself to be the most censorship resistant social publishing protocol to date. There are still plenty of improvements that can be made, and tools that can be built to push censorship resistance even further, but I have yet to see anything else that comes close to Nostr in practice, though some claim to be just as capable of censorship resistance in theory.