For some, censorship resistant simply means no single point of failure - not bitcoin level decentralization. Nostr at the very least doesn't have a SPoF.
Alternative to Twitter does not necessarily imply global scale. It does imply a core set of features and core utility. Regardless, it's kind of irrelevant what Fiatjaf's Vision™️ was originally. It's more interesting to discuss the power and limitations of the current design.
IMO as is, at global scale, nostr will either:
- need some kind of hierarchical design where all layers can somehow economically benefit
- become fragmented at the relay level on some arbitrary basis - topic, community, cost, format, etc
- centralize into a oligopoly
A lot of nostr advocates seem pretty happy with either (2) or (3) being the terminal state for the time being. I don't think that's what they ultimately want though.
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I think it is most likely under any technical design for nostr to end up at 3.
It seems that no matter which built-in economic incentives we create for many players to run relays, there will always be capital-rich player that is willing to provide everything for free until competition dies. That's how Amazon and others keep winning.
Given that, what's left is that the core design allows me to have all my data saved, backed up, moved etc. That means I can use whatever big (free) player there is, until it starts misbehaving. Then I can switch.
Might that be enough to make nostr different?
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It certainly makes nostr different. The way I've been thinking about it is that nostr isn't so much decentralized as it is less centralized. Less centralized is still a big deal as it changes incentives a lot. Does it change them enough? Will some killer app or experience emerge as result? Will the average internet user pay the switching costs? We'll see.
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censorship-resistantwould mean, in my opinion, you must be decentralized. Also to achieve analternative to Twitteryou must be able to achieve an at-scale global feed.