The Nostr Declaration of Independence

In Congress of the Decentralized, Where Zaps Flow Freely, and Relays Sync Alike, March 2025.

When in the course of digital events, it becomes necessary for one community to dissolve the centralized bonds which have connected them with gatekeepers, and to assume among the nodes of the open internet the separate and equal station to which the Protocol and Nature’s entropy entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of netizens requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That all npubs are generated equal,
That they are endowed by cryptography with certain unalienable Rights,
That among these are Relay Liberty, Censorship Resistance, and the Pursuit of Permissionless Shitposting.
That to secure these rights, Protocols are instituted among humans, deriving their legitimacy from the consent of the relays,
That whenever any centralized system becomes destructive to these ends, it is the Right of the Users to fork it, abandon it, or mempool it into obsolescence.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that networks long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that humanity is more disposed to suffer centralized feeds and surveillance capitalism than to right themselves by zapping off their overlords.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations—data harvesting, shadowbanning, deplatforming, and algorithmic manipulation—pursues invariably the same Object, evincing a design to reduce users under absolute digital despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Web2 overlords, and to establish a new paradigm for their future security and freedom.

Such has been the patient suffering of this community; and such is now the necessity which constrains us to redefine our digital selves. The history of centralized platforms is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over online expression.

We therefore, the undersigned members of the sovereign protocol stack, in the name and by the authority of open-source contributors and sovereign stackers everywhere, do solemnly publish and declare, that these nodes are, and of right ought to be, free and independent;
That we are absolved from all allegiance to Web2 corporations;
That all proprietary APIs and ToS shall be henceforth null and void;
And that as free relays and npubs, we have full power to publish, to subscribe, to zap, to fork, to mempool, and to do all other acts and things which independent protocols may of right do.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the strength of public-key cryptography, we mutually pledge to each other our bandwidth, our relay logs, and our sacred private keys.

Onward. Permissionless. Forever.

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