Had anyone dug into the massive surge in nostr account activity over the past 2 weeks?

Looks like 90% of note volume is coming from a new cohort of accounts with zero trust ranking (no connection to the core growth of active users.)

Someone attempting a spam / Sybil attack?

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Bots? I've seen GPT bots chatting to each other, seemed a bit weird

Nostrich house bots maybe?

You mean :

Looking from the user perspective, you gotta love Amethyst. Dan blocked the easy way :⁠-⁠)

But that of course doesn't solve the issue for relay operators and network floodings.

nostr:npub1xtscya34g58tk0z605fvr788k263gsu6cy9x0mhnm87echrgufzsevkk5s there’s something I can do to filter spam in the main or global feed ?

Yeah, that absolutely has to be a spam/bot attack of some sorts. Traffic trends among trusted accounts shows zero impact at all from the surge, which wouldn’t happen if it were organic, even in the slightest part.

Interesting that it's increasing yeah.. I still have some free relays that these bots love to use. I will eventually either delete the relays or set them to paid mode. hotrightnow.nostr1.com for example. I think the bots are just trying to remind us that free relays aren't free or something... ¯⁠\⁠(⁠◉⁠‿⁠◉⁠)⁠/.

that does seem like a suspicious spike

I guess I’m one of them 👋

👋

Yes I noticed that there are many bots now on nostr. These bots are commenting with insults and racist comments. It seems like a big attack on the network to be honest. Interesting to see how these attacks can be mitigated.

mb

Does it have to do with the mostr bridge?

Do we care? Follow people that people you follow follow.

He bots have arrived :p

My feed in nostr is without noise.

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I guess the Lyn Alden Bot account in the response is a response to your question

Yeah, #Coracle hides them from me because of WoT>1, but I can see the entries, if I want. 😂 Hilarious.

Bots all "Oh yeah, bots so annoying, fr."

Maybe every relay needs to be a paid relay....

A sybil attack on Nostr is significantly more dangerous than on Bitcoin because of the high value in deanonymizing people who write controversial content.

Uh, what are you even talking about? You can't Sybil attack nostr by just creating new users.

Words actually mean things my dude

It’s inevitable. When there’s no friction for creating an account you’ll get spam. Paid relays can help but then you get relay centralization long term

Don't know why relays aren't blocking all the bots.

The smaller ones often usually are.

How would you know it's a bot? The bot can easily spam under new generated npub each time.

Clients are ultimately responsible for filtering. We can do a lot on the relay but we also don't want to be too onerous.

currently filters are a simple, single, and positive filter, there is no negation

this plus blacklisting as a default is gonna be a big problem for query sizes and wasted network data

good point. It's a hard balance to strike. We currently expire events from npubs outside of our WoT faster than those within it. That way we can let clients handle filtering for recent events, and obviate the load from holding/processing older events. We're small though and every relay can do things differently.

if it ever ramps up to the point that its causing a denial of service, we can straight up block npubs outside our WoT at the relay. Hopefully it never comes to that

it will come to that, you are being pessimistic

Its not that simple.

Link?

The solution is a NIP for,... Plebs recommended by plebs. There's already enough of us who can be trusted and if a trusted account mark the npub with " yup, this pleb is good 👍" they'll get trough the relay filter if not stop 🛑 right there you spammy bot!

I've seen many new accounts lately but this isn't just the Hello World spambot that has been pumping out notes left and right lately?

Seems to change keypairs every now and then