Nostr Web Client

So I have a totally different perspective on this. I do not believe that moderated communities on nostr are 'censorship'. On the contrary, I think that independently-governed spaces are (and will increasingly become) one of the most important tools we have in the fight *against* censorship.

I will explain how I came to that conclusion, but first let me try to steelman what I think you're saying.

Reddit has obviously been crippled by censorship. Like, it's is basically a psyop at this point. So I 100% agree with you that if nostr communities are implemented in the same way that reddit communities are implemented, nostr will, sooner or later, slide down the path of becoming censorious and irrelevant just like reddit.

So why do I think sub-communities on nostr will *not* lead to censorship?

It comes down to nostr's architecture. The fact is, all data on nostr is public and uncensorable by default because notes are signed and distributed redundantly across multiple relays. Therefore, on it's not possible for the mod of a nostr community to delete your post or ban you without everyone knowing. Unlike reddit, mod actions on nostr are 100% transparent, and mods are therefore accountable for the actions they take. Satellite's interface displays a *public modqueue* for every nostr community. Mods are replaceable because communities are forkable.

I'm sure you'd agree that it's necessary to delete spam, right? If there isn't some mechanism in place to delete spam, every feed in every community would be 100% ads. Right now we're all relying on relays to fight the spam battle, but that won't work forever. This leads me back to my point about why I think communities on nostr are actually a way to prevent censorship.

Censorship prevents communication. One way of preventing communication is by silencing people. Denying people the ability to speak. Signal *blocking*.

What's less obvious is that another way to censor people is by signal *jamming*. They way you do that is by increasing the noise. Imagine trying to be heard in a room of a thousand people all shouting at the top of their lungs.

It comes down to signal/noise ratio. Whether you reduce the signal or increase the noise, the result is the same.

Nostr already does a relatively good job defending against signal blocking, but we're still vulnerable to signal jamming in the form of unmitigated spam and potentially even AI-powered psyops. My viewpoint is that communities (transparently curated and moderated by humans) are how we scale nostr while making it *more* censorship-resistant.

I'm the developer of Satellite (I just pushed and update with these nostr communities yesterday). I want to avoid this being something that divides nostr. If you disagree with my reasoning I want to understand why. nostr:note1vgtuq6rpyy2ycru23gtj7qhaj2p7mlml29sd7zkyte2lphrfa4csz5favv

yunginter.net 2y ago

it’s just curated topics, 172 is a very cool way to do this, but there isn’t moderation nor is there community, its so far from “Reddit-like”

a curator selects and organizes before exhibit

a moderator reacts and presence helps avoid

I would like to see a nostr first implementation of topic specific communities, and as I said curated topics are very cool and much better than hashtags, but this just ain’t Reddit or Facebook group-like except for the most extreme cases which arent the intention of the product, and turn their respective community tools simply into a curated topic.

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Discussion

Stuart Bowman 2y ago

This is just the first super basic implementation though.

That’s a good point about the curator/moderator distinction.

I was planning to add an option allowing the admin to set the community as either “pre-moderated” (posts don’t appear in main feed unless approved) or “post moderated” (posts appear in main feed unless removed).

What do you think nostr:npub1gcxzte5zlkncx26j68ez60fzkvtkm9e0vrwdcvsjakxf9mu9qewqlfnj5z nostr:npub1alpha9l6f7kk08jxfdaxrpqqnd7vwcz6e6cvtattgexjhxr2vrcqk86dsn ?

Crizzo 2y ago

Definitely need both options. Reddit has communities that are heavily curated and some that are more open and lightly moderated. I would have my one community be open for anyone to post without approval if I could.

Stuart Bowman 2y ago

Depends on the nature of the community for sure

Vitor Pamplona 2y ago

I suspect most useful communities will be full of spam post requests very quickly. Like 10x more spam posts than actual content. So, removing things from the community (by adding a flagged event is not good - too many flags to download just to filter bad stuff out). There is no filter in Nostr relays for posts that have NOT been reported. The client must download everything.

That's why I only created the pre-moseration. It makes the job of listening clients easier while allowing post approval apps to offer automatically "approve everything from trusted authors"-type of feature.

⚡️🌱🌙 2y ago

Do this…

nostr:note10y0qk0985gjn5jnmjp68apy0k8ccl44x6hjpkvnnce3x6dd7ymfs2lu4cd

yunginter.net 2y ago

on the bright side the conversation is happening on nostr 😉

Stuart Bowman 2y ago

That makes sense. I suppose clients will need to pull all recent posts tagged for that community in addition to the whitelist of trusted pubkeys and then filter the posts client-side, because for some of the larger communities the number of whitelisted pubkeys will exceed the max length of the authors filter.

yunginter.net 2y ago

just open feeds probably isn’t a good idea, hashtags for that. but if there is a way to say these pubkeys are approved for auto submission and a way to update that list, and a dialog for due notice about the intention. Although I like 172 just think it should be called curated topics to avoid this critical reaction to the phrasing “Reddit-like”. And maybe pre approved should be an separate community add on nip.