I'm not particularly familiar with the project, but:

The claim is that it enables social network/s that are resistant to censorship. It doesn't say that it is a social network that's impossible to censor.

It's a protocol that everyone is free to implement. Valid implementations of the protocol should be compatible with each other. Meaning you don't have to go to soshl.com or use the Soshl app. Relays can choose whether or not to store/broadcast your messages, yes. But they can't stop you from sending them and they can't fake or modify your messages. They also can't revoke your identity. I assume a relay can't force other relays to delete things, but I'm not sure of the details.

A relay choosing to retransmit your message or not could be considered censorship, but it is not the same censorship as a court ordering Youtube to take a video down, which is not the same as Twitter silently burying your posts, which is not the same as the police arresting protestors, etc...

Users publish their messages to multiple relays, and they can be followed by others on multiple relays. The idea is that if a relay starts censoring, then users and their followers can choose different relays, so the system as a whole “routes around censorship”. At least in theory.

I interpreted in a similar yet different way. It is not just that users can choose a non-censoring relay but that users are connected to many different relays and so it does not matter if a few relays censor stuff

This is an interesting detail to me and may just spend on how the community grows

In Mastodon each server makes their own decision on who to censor. Functionally it's grown into a bit of a hard mentality with entire servers being censored if they don't go along with the larger group

Messages are signed locally with entirely local private key, so relays can censor or ban all they like following local laws, without harm to your identity or social graph.

Hopefully someone, like a Raspberry Pi cluster on a derelict Soviet military space station on an international orbit, will take your message and relay it, :shrug:, and those messages can still be authenticated by the key.

That’s how I understand that part; Nostr uses DNS for blue badges and relay connections so “truly” indeed sound a bit of crypto talk though.

Do you know if nostr supports peer to peer messages, or did everything have to go through a relay?

If it's all through a relay it probably isn't very censorship resistant at all. My messages may be signed locally but if the network trends towards mob-based bans and censorship like Mastodon as soon as I get on the wrong side of the network I'll be the only one seeing my signed posts

I believe it's all through relays, there's no peer discovery or even inter-relay meshing. So that could very well could happen. Currently it's just each clients multi-posting to dozen relays and receiving dozen duplicates.

What I believe that "censorship resistance" actually means in un-cryptocurrencified talk is, it lets relay operators filter out locally illegal but not globally unethical contents(e.g. political speeches, pornography, certain URLs and strings) without banning users and/or fragmenting the network. And that is an improvement over Mastodon/ActivityPub architecture.

But boy those crypto guys knows how to hype it up...

>If it's all through a relay it probably isn't very censorship resistant at all. My messages may be signed locally but if the network trends towards mob-based bans and censorship like Mastodon as soon as I get on the wrong side of the network I'll be the only one seeing my signed posts

Well on their page they said" To publish something, you write a post, sign it with your key and send it to multiple relays (servers hosted by someone else, or yourself)."

If you really want to prevent that then it is to also selfhost.

Good question. Not sure about Nostra, but that is how WebRTC is doing it. If there is only 2 people then it is peer to peer, more parties require some sort 'relay' to facilitate the chats.

However the main issue with peer to peer is not everyone is going to be online all the time, relay serves as a temporary storage place until one of the user/client goes online and get the message.