Enable the freedom to communicate.
Reach should be the result of how many people want or don’t want to listen to your message, there is no reason for a third party or algorithm to be required in this equation.
You should be in control of what you can or cannot see. Who you block should be up to you.
Ideally Nostur tries to reduce the need to require or trust any third party in order to communicate, unless there is no other way.
BUT
Nostur is built for iPhone, iPad and Mac users. In one way this is a limitation, (e.g., zap restrictions by Apple) but if we are using the Apple ecosystem already, we might as well use it to our advantage.
Nostur’s target audience already trusts Apple with their data, their messages, photos, calendar, reminders, security cameras, etc.
We don’t need to store our data on random relays, and hope our contact list doesn’t get lost, or leak metadata to the public. We can store everything on our device, and sync using iCloud, it is reliable, and we already use it for far more important data anyway. Converting Apple users to Android or GrapheneOS is an uphill battle, I applaud people who take that route, but it’s not for Nostur users, we have people saying don’t trust the media, don’t use twitter, don’t use iPhone, if we keep going, we end up sending smoke signals in a circle. As for interoperability, we can still publish or export using nostr native formats so you can use your data in another nostr app.
Nostur will publish to relays, but our data is on our device first, iCloud second, and third-party relays third. And you can still use a personal private relay for yourself if you want.
With this in mind, Nostur tries to let relays just be relays, not personal storage. Using relays for storage might end up centralising nostr, in the same way email, which used to be decentralised, is now mostly hosted by google and microsoft.
If you disagree with this mission or direction, Nostur’s source is released under GPL-3.0 license, so feel free to fork and create a different version.
Ultimately, the goal of Nostur is not to get more people to use Nostur, but to get more people to use nostr.