Thanks for the boost, I hope someone can help because it's driving me nuts. I'd try a different type of Nostr client entirely but I really love the features that Amethyst and Garnet offer.

It's not the relays. Its amethyst. Amethyst has a spam filtering tool built in that allows you to keep a block list and a blocked words list, but it also distributes a list that is in there that you can't see, which is unethical IMO. I figured this out when I tried to talk to someone that was blocked in there, I tried to unblock him but he kept getting auto blocked. Blocks are put together from user reports of accounts. The whole thing is pretty opaque. If they want to distribute lists they should be visible to users so they can remove users and words from blocklists.

Since garnet just merges upstream and does not change any of this functionality it inherits these features. I've considered opening an issue to make word and block lists visible, but I wanted to see some other issues closed out first so as not to overwhelm the maintainer. There was an amethyst fork a while back that I used that took that stuff out, but it is now unmaintained. Personally I'd just make them visible, since I like avoiding spam and CP and whatever else and I like the collaborative approach to filtering that amethyst does, nostr is wide open wrt spam as long as relays and clients don't implement PoW, but I should be able to see what I'm being prevented from seeing by default so I can decide if I want to see it or not. Imagine they put "Monero" in that hidden words list, that would break garnet, it should be a priority to make that stuff visible and editable by users.