One of the first things I did after joining Nostr was accidentally #report someone. (Don't worry, I undid it so everything is good now 😂). Here's how it happened.

I had heard of scuttlebutt but never heard about Nostr until on Twitter I saw someone say "follow me on Nostr" with their public key. So I went to the Google Play Store and downloaded a bunch of clients.

The top result was #amethyst so I generated a new private key using Amethyst. All good so far..

But as I was poking around the UI I noticed the "report" options: like "report hate speech", etc. And I thought, "report to _who_? I thought this was decentralized?" So I thought, "maybe if I click it, it'll tell me more information 🤔"

...nope, it just reported and blocked them. Not even much of a confirmation either. I eventually found the "reports" tab on their profile and deleted my reports. But not before I burned that private key and generated a new one 😶

So, sorry if that was you. To be fair, I made sure the profile was _obviously not hate speech_ ...before reporting it as hate speech, just in case it actually went through. So anyway...

But my question now is, what are the ramifications of reporting? I assume the reports are sent to one or more relays, but what's the outcome? (Are there docs on this?) Since anyone can generate a private key (or can one person generate thousandsof them) can the reporting feature be abused for DOSing a certain profile? Is there a trust/reputation system involved, or a heuristic before reports are considered weighty enough?