LeoWandersleb on Nostr: The full thread can be found on Xitter or here: 𝕏 is busy battling censorship ...

The full thread can be found on Xitter or here:

𝕏 is busy battling censorship while Nostr just pretends the fight doesn’t exist.

Free speech isn’t magically won with protocols, it’s won by taking a stand.

tl;dr If Nostr wants to be more than a failed experiment, it needs solutions, not ideology.

𝕏 is where the free speech battle is actually happening. It has the scale, tools and leadership to resist the establishment.

So far, instead of achieving any sort of real-world impact, Nostr has served as some irrelevant notion of ideological purity.

Nostr isn’t solving censorship, it’s avoiding it. Free speech isn’t about running away; it’s about resisting, exposing, and overcoming suppression.

𝕏 is fighting that battle in the real world under direct fire while Nostr pretends that protocols alone protect speech.

Nostr advocates treat decentralization as an end rather than a tool. They act like an unmoderated protocol is a moral victory, ignoring that without filtering or defenses, it collapses into spam, bots, and noise.

If the result is unusable, ideological purity is meaningless.

Let's be clear: Nostr isn't free speech—it’s anarchy disguised as principle.

Let's be honest: beyond its small circle, no one is interested or sees it as practical.

The problem with Nostr isn’t just lack of adoption.

It can’t handle success.

Users will get a mess of relays, bots and garbage if meaningful adoption is ever achieved. Without centralized defenses, there’s no way to stop spam, Sybil attacks, etc. from reducing it to chaos.

Anyone hyping Nostr as a real alternative to 𝕏 ignores the biggest problem—it doesn’t solve information quality. Decentralization alone isn’t enough. A network overrun with bots and noise isn’t free speech, it’s just useless. Without filters, Nostr turns into a chaotic mess.

Normal people don’t want to micromanage their social experience.

They want a platform that just works, not a DIY censorship-resistance experiment that collapses under its own weight. Nostr’s reliance on users picking relays and muting bad actors renders it unworkable at scale.

𝕏, for all its flaws, is the best free speech tool that isn’t controlled by the state (since Jack Dorsey left).

𝕏 has massive engagement and discoverability and every user effectively serves as a moderator.

Nostr could find a niche as an alternative platform for those willing to put in the massive effort to curate their own experience. If developers find ways to manage spam and bots without centralization, it might become usable.

Nostr remains small precisely because it must remain small. At scale, it won't work, which is too bad because a censorship-resistant network should exist (even if it never rivals 𝕏). I hope it somehow succeeds.

At best, Nostr will serve as a backup, a place for anyone who values decentralization over usability.

Like it or not, 𝕏 is and will remain the free speech platform.

If Nostr wants to be more than a niche experiment, it needs real solutions, not just ideology.

Finally, whether intentional or not, Odell and others have pushed Nostr as being critical to the broader Bitcoin movement.

Don't let yourself be distracted and divided by self-righteous Nostr purists like him.

The only protocol to focus on is Bitcoin.