Nostr is not web3.
That's really it, servers have less authority in nostr, and that's why it's more resistant to censorship.
If your concern is private, if this were to find some kind of use you’d inevitably see shared blocklists just as we’ve seen for things like email spam. That’s a really important thing to study for any distributed system because “censorship resistant” inevitably means “full of spam, malware, and illegal content” unless you’re very careful designing some compromise to prevent that (e.g. IPFS mirroring is opt-in, so an innocent node owner doesn’t wake up to the FBI knocking their door in).
In the case of GitHub, anyone who wants to self-host an alternative can do so for only the cost of their time & modest app hosting resources running Gitlab, Gitea, etc. That raises the question of where this offer is coming from: there isn’t a notable problem with censorship on GitHub for otherwise legal content, so you’re mostly talking about things which are actually illegal and that means that something like Nostr isn’t changing the picture much because everything already is decentralized. If the Tornado Cash guys are on a block list, Nostr server owners are going to have legal demands to block their keys, too, just as a hosting company would get a take-down for a private GitLab instance.
If governments do try to get things removed on Nostr they're going to have a much much harder time. Folks can re-pop-up on different relays. Governments can keep playing whack-a-mole but I have hard time seeing they'll have any success. Your post makes it sound like a government can snap it's fingers & every relay will magically stop carrying content: that seems wildly out of touch to me, seems to be way different from what I'd expect when this situation crops up.
Not needing to host is a critical change of the game here, in my view.
The DNS system is decentralized and updates take seconds. We’ve seen this for decades with things like open source projects when someone gets tired of hosting it.
> Your post makes it sound like a government can snap it's fingers & every relay will magically stop carrying content: that seems wildly out of touch to me
Look at what happened with the TornadoCash guys — once legal action was taken, how many exchanges would allow transactions to or from their addresses? This would be similar: once enough people start using it, someone will do something illegal, and then governments are going to start telling server operators in their jurisdictions to stop allowing that traffic if they don’t want to be charged as accessories. Since those guys don’t want to go to jail or have their servers packed up by federal marshals, they’ll figure out whatever is necessary to block certain keys.
Something like Nostr might make it slightly easier to replicate things or provide a less antiquated key management system than GPG but it won’t be a game-changer but an incremental improvement at best.
I think this effort here is both overstating the problem of using GitHub and understating the challenges of replacing it. People use GitHub because running servers is a chore they don’t want to deal with. Relatively few people are donating hosting and the ones who do generally aren’t interested in hosting the few types of content which GitHub bans, either. They’re certainly not going to go to jail rather than help the police who tracked something illegal to their IPs.
DNS is hardly a good shield for dealing with potential takedowns. It seems obviously true for a variety of reasons, including some mandated takedowns at the centralized DNS layer itself. Relays obviously allow a vault potentially infinitely replicated way means for unhosting that simply lacks many good modern parallels.
TornadoCash again seems radically different from anything we are talking about, simply because it is so heavily in the highly regulatory financial regime, in a way that Nostro simply isn't. The government never really had to step in; the threat of it maybe having to made everyone change their tune very fast. And there just were very very very few actual decision makers involved. Nostr is far more decentralized in practice, even though the number of users is much lower than cryptocoin stuff.
Elsewhere I've agreed that replacing GitHub is really really hard & long work, & I've pined for us to take smaller steps rather than make such big totalizing attempts. But I think you don't really grasp the unhosting ideas& advantage. And you seem unwilling to deem any attempt worth starting. At some point the feelings against big centralized social networks leads us to trying new things, but I mostly read fatalistic why try from your people-dont-want-to-host-things, even though Nostr's whole point is to make being a relay at small interpersonal scales reslly easy, without having to tackle the hard big-scale computing hosting challenges. And if your relay goes down,... so what? Your small unhosted network is there.
> But I think you don't really grasp the unhosting ideas& advantage
This is why so many people are comparing this to blockchains/web3 — people seem to have started by saying everyone needs to adopt a particular technology but it’s like pulling teeth to get a proponent to give a concrete example of a real problem experienced by non-hypothetical people which is competitively solved by using it. If you ask for details the response is not to provide them but say “you don’t get it”, which in my experience is one of the most reliable indicators of a technology which will fail.
I first used self-hosted development tools in the 90s so assume I’m familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of working that way. What I’m missing here is a benefit from Nostr which would be so beneficial that people would give up the advantages of the systems everyone has settled on. For example, if the big pitch is “censorship resistance” I’d start by establishing who’s being censored on a scale noticeable enough to support a large development effort, followed by convincing analysis that the proposed system will actually accomplish its goals.
The infrastructure is decentralized, but it's one of the most centralized systems in the world, in terms of what's available/what you'll find.
> people seem to have started by saying everyone needs to adopt a particular technology but it’s like pulling teeth to get a proponent to give a concrete example of a real problem experienced by non-hypothetical people which is competitively solved by using it.
I think a lot of it is a pretty simple desire: we want to chat with each other, and be able to have access to the data. Literally no social media system on the planet actually lets you take your conservations out. You're limited to 24 hours of caching at most. If you quit or get banned, your words vanish. If someone else quits or gets banned, their words vanish. Memories up in smoke. With Nostr, the data is yours to do with.
In general I think there's a pretty obvious calling here, for people to have something/anything. Right now we literally have no option to start from, no ability to do anything or try other things, on any of the major incumbent systems. Your criticism seems very "no one can explain what it's for" conservative, but the progressives don't care about what it's for. We want something where we can figure out what it's for, we want a way to start to figure out what progress might look like. We need a starting place to explore what is possible.
There's already a ton of really neat & interesting NIPS. There's already social networks forming. We already can archive and relay our data, over any available medium including offline. There are interesting capabilities here which are unmirrored. I don't think anyone here is concerned about the normies right now: the alpha geeks want to serve themselves, want to build freedom & possibility, which is what's denied right now. They are building possible starting places we can adapt and adopt to many uses. And they're doing an excellent job, doing new things, that no one else can, in part because no one else can do anything at all (because giant megacorporations own all the other mediums)_and in part because they have good technical underpinnings with potentiate a much wider space of possibility than the limited centralized site-based hosting systems we have today.
Contrary to your shade, I don't think the Nostr people are fanatics about their tech. It's a starting place, that techies find to be a reasonably good place to start building exploring from. There's not a lot of contenders, to be honest. We need something, and very little else right now fits.
Progressives have goals. That doesn’t always mean solutions, but nobody should struggle to say what they’re trying to improve. That’s somewhat conspicuously absent in Dorsey’s bounty listing, and that’s why I’ve been asking.
Ultimately, the problem is that a service like GitHub or GitLab uses a fair amount resources to run. You have non-trivial storage needs, multiple separate systems making changes which aren’t a simple write-once structure (think about what git rebase does to your storage needs), and non-trivial services like CI. Most projects started out running those themselves (possibly starting in the CVS or Subversion eras), got tired of it and switched to something like GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc. and in general that’s been a popular choice. They have paid services which generate a fair amount of revenue to support their businesses but the free tiers allow many open source projects to work without thinking about infrastructure.
This means the very first question I have is the still unanswered one: what is going to motivate someone to spend time working on this or take the risk of switching to it? Nostr isn’t designed for this problem so it’ll be harder to solve there and you’re still going to have to pay for servers since relays don’t guarantee storage unless you run them, and I don’t see very many people who are unsatisfied enough with the status quo that they’re going to donate millions of dollars worth of development time.