If Nostr relays begin censoring your new posts, it creates a paradox: the only way to tell your followers where to find your uncensored content is through the very relays that are suppressing it.
In Nostr, relays are the distribution layer. If your main relays stop broadcasting your notes, either due to moderation, rate limiting, policy changes, or silent dropping, then your audience may see only your old posts, with no way to know you’ve moved or that anything is missing. Even if you update your relay list or post a note announcing your migration, those updates won't reach your followers unless at least one of their connected relays overlaps with your new ones.
This breaks the assumption that Nostr is censorship resistant. You may still be technically posting to the network, but if no one sees it, you’re effectively silenced. Worse, it’s a quiet form of censorship, your audience may not even realize it’s happening.
Without out-of-band coordination or trusted indexers who check many relays, this problem can lock users into a censored echo chamber. The result is a fragmented web of disconnected voices, each isolated on their own uncensored islands, unable to signal to others where they’ve gone.
So while Nostr lets you publish freely, it doesn’t guarantee discoverability. And without that, free speech becomes free solitude.
On the surface, the inability to delete Nostr notes might appear as radical freedom, but in practice, it can function as a subtle form of censorship. Here’s why:
True freedom of expression includes the freedom to retract or revise one’s words. If a protocol makes deletion impossible or impractical, it traps speech in amber. A poorly worded thought, a change of heart, or even a simple error becomes a permanent fixture. This permanence discourages people from speaking freely in the first place, especially those who aren't already steeped in the culture of radical transparency. It creates a chilling effect.
Moreover, the inability to delete also prevents users from curating their own digital identity over time. This hands over control to the archive, to indexers, or to relays, who now act as unappointed custodians of your voice. Ironically, a protocol designed to be censorship-resistant can create a new kind of censorship—one that punishes reflection and evolution. It fossilizes speech, rewarding loudness over subtlety, and permanence over growth.
A truly open protocol must protect not just the right to speak, but the right to unspeak, to take ownership of one's narrative across time. Without that, we’re not free; we’re just trapped in a different kind of control.
Against the Tyranny of the Alarm Clock: Reclaiming Our Mornings
In the quiet pre-dawn hush, before the first light spills across the horizon, the human body stirs with a wisdom older than civilization. Our circadian rhythm—an elegant internal clock shaped by thousands of years of sunrise and sunset—prepares us to wake, not with violence, but with grace. Yet in modern life, this natural order is shattered daily by the shrill tyranny of the alarm clock. Jarring, artificial, and intrusive, the alarm clock should be used only as a last resort. It severs us from our biological harmony, denies us the stillness we need to begin our days, and conditions us to start each morning in panic rather than presence.
Alarm clocks are not neutral tools. They are blunt instruments of modern life’s industrial demands, originally born of factory schedules and the need to regiment human productivity. When we allow ourselves to be wrenched from sleep by a digital screech, we override our body’s intuitive process of waking. Sleep scientists have shown that waking abruptly from deep sleep—especially during the wrong phase of the sleep cycle—disrupts hormonal balance, impairs cognition, and increases stress. Over time, this habitual interruption can compound fatigue rather than alleviate it. We trade the wisdom of our own biology for the artificial rhythm of machines.
Waking naturally, by contrast, allows the body to complete its sleep cycle, releasing cortisol gradually as the sun rises, signaling the body to wake gently and clearly. This process supports mood, energy, and mental clarity. The person who wakes with the sun or ambient light, who lets their eyes open softly in silence, enters the day in communion with life—not in resistance to it.
Furthermore, alarm clocks deny us one of the most important and overlooked human needs: stillness. The moment we wake is sacred. It is a liminal space between the mystery of sleep and the demands of the world. When we are jolted into consciousness and immediately thrown into motion, we miss the quiet opportunity to align our spirit, to reflect, to breathe. The time just after waking should be unhurried—a chance to greet the day intentionally, not reactively. Alarm clocks fracture this space and reinforce a culture that idolizes urgency over awareness.
There are, of course, times when an alarm is necessary—early flights, commitments, or rare schedule constraints. But these should be exceptions, not norms. The default approach should be to design our life in harmony with our body’s rhythm: dimming lights at night, avoiding screens, rising with natural light or gentle cues like a sunrise lamp or birdsong. When we structure our days to support the body’s innate cycle, we no longer need to be coerced into wakefulness.
In a world obsessed with control, the refusal to be startled awake is an act of sovereignty. To rise without alarms is not laziness—it is alignment. It is choosing health over haste, presence over productivity, and peace over panic. When we wake gently, we don’t just reclaim our mornings—we reclaim something of our humanity.
Let the alarm clock be your last resort, not your master. Let nature, not noise, be your call to rise.