that's another problem too
i spent a whole year building on the premise that LN payments could be used to prevent spam, for anonymising relays
and you are right, it's exactly the same deal here, and everyone who promotes gossip on nostr needs to be whooped upside the head
not only is it spammy, it also makes it really hard to tell a client to use the relay you are building!
Gossip protocol to find cheap routes for lightning payments makes sense because it's not being used to distribute human created metadata. There's no benifits to try and exploit this mechanism.
A gossip protocol to distribute lists of human curated relays, each and every one of them having an agenda, blatant or sublime, would be a disaster. It will be exploited because it can and will benefit spammers.
Letting people chose to use a relay that filters NSFW content has to be superior to forcing people to constantly be blocking NSFW relays they don't want.
gossip is needed for both bitcoin mempool and for lightning for different reasons
yes, they reduce the chances of partitioning
that's the first reason it helps resist censorship
second, gossip is needed for a source routed protocol like lightning because clients have to decide where to forward every hop of the payment, they can't trust the nodes on the path to decide for them, and actually, the cryptographic reason is they define the path because it's cryptographically secure
that's why we have AMP, because if any point a client chooses, is offline, or has a banked up network buffer, our payment fails!
that's why lightning has a problem and that's why nostr now has a problem because this is not appropriate for nostr at all
