Original author: Rita Liao
Original title: Damus pulled from Apple’s App Store in China after two days
Compiled by: Qianwen, ChainCatcher
Damus, one of the fastest-growing Twitter alternatives, has been removed from app stores in mainland China just two days after being approved by Apple.
Damus runs on Nostr, a decentralized social networking protocol backed by Jack Dorsey (ChainCatcher Note: Twitter co-founder, Square founder and CEO). Damus shared the app review notice it received on Twitter, showing that the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) requested that the app be removed from Chinese mainland app stores because it "includes content that is illegal in China."
Decentralization means that there is no central authority to decide who can participate or what kind of speech can be made on the platform. This made Damus' approval process difficult at first, because Apple required the products to establish a mechanism to mark objectionable content, but Damus eventually solved this problem and successfully entered Apple's App Store on February 1.
The decentralized nature of the app is undoubtedly the reason for its brief debut in China. In mainland China, information is strictly controlled by the government. Social networks that operate legally in China all have censorship tools to remove illegal content or information banned by the authorities. Anonymity does not exist because users need to submit real personal information to register.
Authorities have banned Damus from being downloaded in China through the Apple App Store. But so far, it appears that the app is still accessible. As of February 3, users who have installed Damus on their phones can still view and comment on posts directly in China.
Nostr achieves censorship resistance through a "relay system," a network that receives posts and distributes them to network participants. Users can post their posts to multiple relays, and they can only see content from the relays they are connected to. Therefore, if one relay is censored, they can post content through other relays. However, competition between networks also undermines the platform's network effects, which means that Damus cannot be an ideal alternative to Twitter.
“It’s more like a news group, interest group or fan club or something like that,” said Frank Hu, COO of ByteTrade Lab, a web3 infrastructure startup backed by SIG (Suina Asia Ventures).
“Users can choose relays and need to abide by the rules there. Relays compete with each other, and so do relay owners. Based on this competition, builders can build different communities - paid or free, censored or uncensored, targeting different groups of fans. This is a free market based on relays.”
Is there any way to block every single relay? Hu argues that Damus runs on “multiple centralized servers” rather than “a fully decentralized” infrastructure. So censoring Damus will be difficult. It has about 300 relayers right now, and people can make self-hosted relays, so it’s pretty hard to shut it down.
Let's wait and see how the app performs in the Chinese market in the next few weeks.