What do I mean with instance independent?
I mean that user’s are not dependent on a specific server instance to communicate, and can use different instances interchangeably.
Single instance networks like WhatsApp or Signal are obviously not instance independent.
And even federated networks like Matrix or the Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.) force the user to chose a instance and then be dependent on that instance.
If the your instance decides to ban you, no one can message your account anymore, and in many setups, the instance could even impersonate you.
What is the alternative?
Networks like Nostr and Session give you a public key as your user identifier and then route messages through nodes, which cannot send messages on your behalf and also cannot effectively censor you.
If you know any other networks that work like this, please post them here
Tor can do this, since you can both host and visit using the relay. I am sure there are quite some chat apps that uses tor but I did not take the time to look for one.
I’m not sure this is how I understood Nostr’s censorship resistance.
Relays can and do censor users a lot — to fight spam at least. What makes it good for avoiding censorship is how easy it is to discover relays whose policy fits your preferences (e.g. where authors you like publish their notes).
A relay can ban users just like a Mastodon server can, but discovery and publishing on multiple nodes and running your own relay is so cheap that ban doesn’t matter that much
Cwtch is P2P over Tor for 1-to-1 conversations. Briar is technically more decentralized as it can work over Bluetooth and LAN, but it’s for those reasons that it’s not anonymous like Cwtch.
Xmpp are the old og, still maintained, somewhat popular distributed messenger protocol. Irc are probably older but using irc probably need phd in networking and shit. Even whatsapp are based on xmpp. Problem is similar to fediverse, no feature parity between servers. Some server have e2e omemo support, some doesn’t, some have offline sync, some doesn’t and need to be constantly online etc etc. Its a mess so no average joe bother with xmpp, abit unfortunate imho.
I think you almost must accept this if looking for a decentralized communication software, otherwise the messages must be stored somewhere on other’s device, which is not preferable when designing the protocol.
Yes, but they can’t take away your nostr account like your Fediverse server can do.
If one relay blocks you, you can just use a different relay.
Also most nostr clients come with multiple relays by default to prevent this from happening in the first place.
Yes, you can publish on multiple nodes, and receive from multiple nodes.
This is not how most of the Fediverse works.