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Gm. It seems that it will be very hard for Brazil to identify and enforce the fines on VPN usage for Twitter/X. But it’s a powerful scare tactic. When the United States banned gold ownership in the1930s (which lasted for four decades all the way into the 1970s btw), they didn’t really enforce it at the household level. They just had large prison terms that were rarely ever applied, which effectively dried up liquidity in the gold market. Some people have pointed out that Nostr relays could be blocked by Brazilian internet providers if Nostr was big enough to matter. However, more relays could spin up, so they’d have to keep adding to the list. Brazil’s government could then say it’s illegal to use VPNs for any Nostr app around internet censoring. The defense against that is to make Nostr as ubiquitous as possible. The more apps that tie into Nostr in some way, the harder it is to ever ban it in practice. Some people might not even know their favorite app uses Nostr. Imagine if everyone’s favorite short form app, long form app, podcasting app, reviews app, wallet app, recipes app, picture app, music app, and tons of other stuff are tied into Nostr, and how hard that would be to ban. If Nostr becomes big enough to really matter, it’s because it’ll be tied into so many different things. That’s super powerful. And the devs keep building rapidly.

Replies (90)

Fear is their main weapon. Just as here in Venezuela they imprison some people if they are caught with certain messages that do not please the regime. Thus giving more fear. The tools to combat these arbitrariness are there. And only some will take them. Maybe even some will come to NOSTR
With normal people you just make an example out of one person and give them whopping fine, put it on the media and everyone will then falling line. Quite simple really. Its very little about enforcement anyway. More about signaling. I got a VPN and opened twitter/x for the first time in a while. VPN is set to Brazil naturally. 😂😂😂😂
It is a powerful scare tactix but I believe the main point is to scare large Brazilian accounts, like influencers, politicians, jornalists, etc to not post on X bc their identity is known and if they keep posting then it must mean they are using a VPN... I suppose the hope is that if those people flee the platform to threads, bluesky, facebook, etc, then most Brazilians will too. Curiously, the fact that dictator Moraes ordered people be fined 9K a day for using a VPN to use X, is proof that it has nothing to do with X, but that rather the goal is to control what the Brazilian people can and can't see. Truly scary times.
Unfortunately, it will be very easy to identify and fine people for using a VPN for Twitter. If someone has a public profile, a single post is all it takes for a judge to make an example of them, and I think the media would be happy to show it in the news. For people who are just browsing, nothing will happen, that's for sure.
Perfect 👌🏼 Expecting many users to use our because a restriction happens on their favorite social network as X is far from being an efficient reality for the protocol to grow. The huge challenge that the protocol must achieve is that it is invisible to users who do not even know they use it, because their favorite app X (or whatever it is called) continues to work without having to switch to another. That would be brutal.
many posted VPN / block restriction in X from list of countries - it is bogus info. since real users in those places with protech knowledge always able to access. exactly like official gazette ban means noting except normie cannot access,
it affects large accounts which should be the most terrifying act yet…. They only care if your voice is amplified. Censorship is an all or nothing game. Either we, as a tech community, stand against this right now, collectively, together because we are able to truly decipher the signal from the noise. Or, like the collapse of the Soviet Union… we watch as the oligarchs (those who had access to information during the fall of the wall) usurp power for the next cycle while the plebs lack the resources to do so after we are defeated individually. A choice in timelines. Hopefully we see each other on the other side. 🫶🏼
It makes me sad that profile pictures are not standardized between nostr clients. Lynn‘s profile picture shows up fine in Primal, but in Damus I get a default profile picture. The same thing is true for banner images. I just wish there were some kind of a standard for this kind of thing.
On another note, I think that any short-form or long-form app, podcasting app, review aggregator, wallet app, recipe app, photo sharing app, music streaming service, and numerous other platforms will need to integrate with Nostr if they hope to remain relevant. Without such connectivity, these apps risk becoming obsolete, akin to a brick-and-mortar store without an online presence.
About Proton : https://www.weforum.org/organizations/proton/ Proton and the WEF are connected and it's public - no conspiracy here, this is probably a good thing for the world. The WEF objectives are noble and Proton VPN can help through anonymized data to further shape their policies and identify key influencers. "Proton was started in Switzerland in 2014 by scientists who met at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Its vision is to build an internet where privacy is the default through an ecosystem of services accessible to everyone, everywhere, every day. Over 50 million people from over 180 countries have signed up to use Proton products such as ProtonMail, ProtonVPN and Proton Drive."