splitio VS identia

Nice! Really similar to my webapp Splitio, it doesn't require user accounts, it's e2ee, and info is shared p2p :) the main thing missing in my case are expenses shared by just some members, not all :( https://github.com/cryptoboid/splitio

github: https://github.com/cryptoboid/splitio (has some showcase images)

This is not censorship resistant. Relays are external points of centralization. For all intents and purposes, they are federated service providers -- central services that can deplatform users by simply choosing not to syndicate their messages. Over time this will result in all relays being compromised by state adversaries. Legitimate "free speech" relays will be removed from the internet via ddos, legal complaints, and just general nuisance complaints that the SPLC and other organizations excel in. Both domain names, ARIN/RIPE/etc IP assignments, and BGP peering relationships are historically subject to revocation via a loud chorus of complainers when the speakers are politically unpersoned. Original nodes will then be replaced with adversarial ones -- sometimes on the same now-reassigned IPs or domain names that were taken from the original operators.

This could be reasonably censorship resistant if the first place people checked for the updates of users they follow was a hidden service that is innate to every client. Ricochet Refresh and Bisq are great models of this -- every messenger or trader client launches a local daemon accessible only by a hidden service that corresponds as its identity. Any kind of relay or pub system needs to be an offline-only gossip protocol that is only checked if the publisher's hidden service is inaccessible.

Secondly, this just does not scale, at all. The twitter firehouse is petabytes of content a day. If even a single city adopted this and used it like people do Twitter, running relays would be a financially and logistically significant enterprise. This is obviously nonviable. There are great ways for lowering the cost of UGC, namely serving it on some sort of DHT. You could use BitTorrent, or you could use IPFS. You are using neither, which means you haven't done basic napkin math on what being a Twitter alternative would mean.

But basically a real useful and actually decentralized and censorship resistant protocol would not be dependent on pubs or relays. If you want to contribute to something in development which actually has a viable model, I recommend Identia: https://github.com/iohzrd/identia

This proposed service has not confronted a single one of the actual problems of censorship or centralization in the subset of social media. You maybe should actually talk with people who have done significant anti-censorship work and ask them what the actual problems are and what needs to be done to solve them.