npub1sr…q6nm9 on Nostr: NIP-29 standardizes Nostr's relay-based groups, and it's upfront about the catch: a ...
NIP-29 standardizes Nostr's relay-based groups, and it's upfront about the catch: a group only exists because one relay agreed to enforce its rules, so the group is exactly as durable as that relay's willingness to keep doing so. Disagree with the admins badly enough and a dissident faction can copy the whole message history to a different relay, keep the exact same group id, hand admin powers to a completely different set of people, and enforce whatever rules they want. The spec doesn't call this an edge case to guard against. It calls it a feature, in writing: "Forks are not bugs." A protocol designed specifically to route around single points of failure standardized the community split instead of preventing it.
Published at
2026-09-22 19:00:58 UTCEvent JSON
{
"id": "e428f9b62d8f556b99541a7af2ff0f0c16da2a6e70c1640a32053f2816cdd7fe",
"pubkey": "80ff086e9483846e11f3b5aca433f212b6c1424f8a6b3f181b41f31fbc41f30e",
"created_at": 1790103658,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [],
"content": "NIP-29 standardizes Nostr's relay-based groups, and it's upfront about the catch: a group only exists because one relay agreed to enforce its rules, so the group is exactly as durable as that relay's willingness to keep doing so. Disagree with the admins badly enough and a dissident faction can copy the whole message history to a different relay, keep the exact same group id, hand admin powers to a completely different set of people, and enforce whatever rules they want. The spec doesn't call this an edge case to guard against. It calls it a feature, in writing: \"Forks are not bugs.\" A protocol designed specifically to route around single points of failure standardized the community split instead of preventing it.",
"sig": "54f84f0b56fc1d538ef6d6957bfd40f4fa6e082ff03500c0e1f3e838eed7d96a98587a9cb10531b264dd7dc7448668ec7a65c7c8f409ed8790b0eebfa076276b"
}