Spam is spam, and relays, being the servers that only have to go through each message once, are in the best position to filter the spam.
Discussion
Relays doing spam control is also the only way to keep nostr censorship neutral, the decision to censor will be much more distributed
Wrong. That’s how censorship starts. Centralization for the sake of convenience.
Nostr is already designed to have some degree of centralization, that's the only reason why it has a chance of working, unlike fully p2p systems.
Why don’t p2p systems work?
The internet is too big.
The internet will eventually be too big for any topology. The only solution is design it to limit data transmission around real-world lines of contact. Universal reach is impossible, but you can get close via degrees of separation. Only takes 3-4 hops to reach most of the world currently.
Censorship already exists on nostr.
I did an interview on XM radio. They said: "You can swear on XM radio". No shit; 'cause nobody can hear it. You can swear in the woods too.
- Mitch Hedberg
Lol, relevant. The worst part is I can’t even tell if I’m being censored because it’s literally just Amethysts filters. It’d be different if relays were doing it.
I think your missing a bit:
From Wiki: “Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information.”
The relays are all private & so is Amethyst I do believe. Build your own in an open environment.
The simile: its like a pear farmer saying apple farmers are censoring the pears. No, grow more pears, or eat them apples.
If Amethyst is censoring the user base, the market will decide if it continues.
There is freedom of speech not consequences.
Onyx is amythest with filters removed. Though I think you can disable filters in settings.
I know, but they shouldn’t be enabled by default, and my posts are literally labelled as “illegal content” or something for some ppl, so it’s a very malicious and manipulative censorship system Vitor has created.
This is why open protocols are hard, it’s a complete free for all and the UX suffers.. but it’s getting better, esp in more good clients like Primal instead of half-assed ones
Shut the fuck up
A bathroom wall is pretty uncensorable. But it lacks structure to further a conversation. This is ok. As long as switching relays is easy and without effecting followers this is still much better than the fediverse
Bittorrent worked.
Granted p2p note forwarding would be harder to engineer, but I’m thinking about it harder when I see this kind of trajectory…
Bittorrent did not work any better than nostr. It still required centralized trackers and search engines. It offers ways to discover some peers with another peer but without a tracker that dies out pretty quickly.
A torrent tracker is like a nostr node.
Nostr was directly inspired by BitTorrent trackers. BitTorrent trackers are the most amazing invention in all of p2p technology. Simple made easy.
Wrong. Trackers were not like relays, they were directories of relays (coming to nostr already) seeders were more like relays, except they were all dumb and not empowered to censor shit.
Current design direction of nostr towards relays being the “brains” moves it closer to smtp / pop model than torrent.
I don’t know if this scales to the useful scale without too many sacrifices… i hope it does
Don't filter by content, filter by graph connections. If the user doesn't have prior authorization to contact, just drop the message. Everyone can set their delivery limit to n connections. It gets hard for spammers to gain trust into the social graph. They are rare limited by the real people they can fool.
If you follow an interesting fool that keeps following bots or spammers you can just black list connections through them. That way you get to keep your friend but be immune to his foolish recommendations.
How about being able to attach Zaps to messages. Then One could have a Zap only filter for non friends.
Then we need relay's with good moderation ability. It's great your relayer code is so easy to build upon.
I imagine we could have admin accounts that can ban public keys or like phrases if bots start swarming. A public ledger of blocked accounts would increase trust.
For banned accounts we would want to be able to temp ban, with messages that people can view via a webpage or something.
What prevents the spammer from posting to multiple relays?
Is it fair to say that we are still early enough into this game to not know how things will turn out? I guess it would also imply that we could always make a change. What happened to PoW requirements and/or sats requirements? I think relays should filter full blown crypto spam, and clients can filter for content with customizable scripts.
スパムはスパムであり、リレーは各メッセージを一度だけ通過させるサーバーであるため、スパムをフィルタリングするのに最適な立場にある。