If I'm a government facing Nostr, I don't need to ban it - I just keep it small and marginalized. Let it become an echo chamber where a few thousand users build projects for themselves. Association with extremism, complexity narratives, and developer infighting do the work for me.
Same strategy worked perfectly with crypto: let the public think it's just "speculation" and "investment" rather than a parallel financial system. As long as normies see it as gambling for tech bros, they never examine the actual threat it poses.
Marginalization is more effective than prohibition. You don't make martyrs, you don't trigger Streisand effects - you just ensure revolutionary technology stays in a sandbox while you control the infrastructure that actually matters.