In hindsight, in was inevitable 😂
Discussion
In fairness, you can choose smaller relays that dont rate limit
Indeed. Relays that rate limit to the point of being unusable ought to be avoided. 🤝
Optionality remains the key feature!
The most popular relays will all eventually need to rate limit, whitelist, or AUTH, because of attacks. Can't have an open webserver getting that much traffic without protecting the server from malicious actors.
Choose your poison.
Rate limit against spam. Don’t rate limit against normal user activity. It’s not that difficult to understand what I’m saying. You are simply wanting to be argumentative. Please kindly fuck off.
Detecting spam is the trick. New npubs could have a probationary period until "vetted". WoT-based lifting.
In general, the incentive ought to be to create content with which other trustable npubs want to interact.
Bots will always create multiple npubs, so a simple blacklist for spam isn't enough.
That pushes the filtering burden onto the best/heaviest users, tho, which will push them off the relay. Only useful for an onboarding relay, or something.
We could set up a charity for an onboarding relay.
Also doesn't solve for the sheer quantity of volume over the connection, which will eventually explode. It is not yet clear who is paying to throughput and manage the traffic and the servers.
"Spam" is a subjective rating, like "weeds". Define precisely how to identify spam, please.
all relays MUST RATE LIMIT from being ATTACKED there r stress testers and sabotage-rs generating script bombarding with new npubs in millisecs nostr:npub1fjqqy4a93z5zsjwsfxqhc2764kvykfdyttvldkkkdera8dr78vhsmmleku
I just removed the rate limiting relay and my client works way smoother now.. just saying.
Did the same 🤝
Trying it out too. So far, so good 🤝
Using blastr and at least one of the aggregating relays like nostr.band, I believe should mostly mitigate any notes going “missing” but someone more knowledgeable can probably speak to that better than I can.
Ah I didn’t know nostr.band was an aggregating relay. Is it a better idea to connect to that one than to nos.lol for example?
This is much less entertaining, but technically there is no *Nostr* rate limiting. Only relays. 😘
Exactly. The whole point is that a single, or even all relays except yours, can be evil and you’ll still be a first class-citizen
👇
nostr:note1pr8wpr90dyu7c050er6n7k4n95ckjgedythtujw2pt9t5jvxurns7cr8dm
Wish some people had made a lot of noise about outbox model which solves this issue!
lol indeed 😂 Human behavior takes the easy path until enough pain is felt to change paths. Maybe enough relays doing this would create enough pain. Or maybe it would do the opposite and just motivate more people to centralize onto fewer relays that are being subsidized by their operators. Idk the best solution. I just know that that restricting normal/typical user activity is a sure way to lose users and NOT grow nostr 🤷♂️
lol yes technically 😂 but if it’s 1 of 2 of the non-paid bootstrap relays provided by one of the largest clients, then for those users it could feel like “nostr” rate limiting, especially if there’s no guidance or onboarding to using additional relays.
technically you can be anonymous and pay also
this was about read rate limiting, not write rate limiting. noone expects no write rate-limiting.
Thanks for clarification. I do think normal users would expect not to get rate limited when liking posts to just a couple per minute. Totally understand the need to mitigate spam, that it’s all a work in progress,
Nostr isn't an app, tho.
They are free to self-host or rent a relay.
It's a free protocol, not free infrastructure.
Damus is an app. The app that Will makes. Will is the person I was responding to. He promoted his app as being a censorship resistant alternative to Twitter/X. Users who migrate over and onboard to the default bootstrap relays in his app have only 2 non-paid write relays. If one of those is down and they happen to press “like” too many times too quick then they can’t post on his app and get an error that they’re posting too quickly, which doesn’t make sense because all they did was press like and they hadn’t posted anything (in their mind). They won’t understand relays. They won’t understand events and event kinds. They won’t understand that they need to pay for write access to the other two bootstrap relays, and even if they do they may not have bitcoin. It simply appears broken. Telling new users that you’re trying to onboard to go run their own relay is about as tone deaf as you can get. Please think before you speak.
Rate-limiting is not censorship.