ShortFiat on Nostr: If a government wants to shut down free speech, then the most effective way that they ...

If a government wants to shut down free speech, then the most effective way that they can do so is through the money system.
Many media creators receive sponsorship money from advertisers, which means that they can be de-monetised. Governments can put pressure on advertisers that sponsor content creators that say things they don’t like. The advertising companies are susceptible to government pressure as they have a physical locations and they have revenues in fiat money.

A independent creator might be geographically un-locatable, but their sponsors can be located and threatened with legal action, imprisonment or with the cessation of their card processing facilities. There are not many companies, that currently do not depend on the fiat money system in some way for the continuation of their operations.

Creators that depend upon subscription revenue are even more prone to censorship as they can be directly de-monetised through the banking system by the removal their card processing facilities. The international banking system is controlled by the USA and if they feel that the speech of a specific creator is a threat to them, then they can de-monetise and effectively silence that creator.
The fact that almost all creators are currently publishing their content through centralised platforms makes it even easier for authorities to bring an end to the right to free speech of any creator that they choose. We have seen censorship and demonetisation on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Rumble and Locals are alternative media platforms that are used by a number of creators that have been demonetised by the mainstream platforms, but they still have sponsors and fiat money subscription systems that could be used to shut them down at some point in the future

If a creator is distributing their content through Nostr and are being funded by their listeners using Bitcoin, then they can’t be shut down through government control of the money system. If they are publishing anonymously, then there is no way for the authorities to know who they are or where they are in the world.

FanFares is an open source application and the source code will be stored on decentralised services. If the primary FanFares application is shut down, then anyone can spin up another version of the software and customers can access it from the new ip address. The new ip addresses can be distributed through encrypted messaging services.

An instance of FanFares will take a spit of the payments made to creators from their audience, so anyone that runs a version of fanfares will be able to add their own wallet address to the application and earn a fee split. This is the incentive for multiple instances of FanFares to exist across the world as nodes in a network and therefore the service can never be shut down. Every Nostr relay could run a version of FanFares and this will help them to monetise and cover their storage costs. Any node runner that does not respect the creators of FanFares and tries to cut them out of the fee split, should not have their IP address shared by the community.

If governments want to monitor content published through FanFares, then they will have to pay to do so using Bitcoin.