Is banning/filtering obvious spam censorship?
Discussion
I vote no
At the individual level, absolutely no. At the protocol level, yes.
Obvious spam is noise that does not contribute anything of substance to a conversation. I would put it in the non-censorship category.
Always helps to have definitions. Need to know what “obvious spam” is. And make sure it doesn’t include, “Posts that I don’t agree with” 😏
Like telegram bots that say the same thing over and over.
Maybe people like spam and getting scammed, who are we to say there is no substance?
I could support certain relays offering to filter that out. Clients too. Users may choose the experience they want.
But yes, is it censorship? Sometimes it’s not necessarily the content, it’s the frequency that makes it spam.
Your relay your choice. On a centralized platform you have no choice and the lack of choice is the problem with their censorship.
I run your relay. You still have no control over my feed. I could also run my own or any of 100 others. I do run others in addition to yours.
Put another way, censorship is fine. What is bad is the lack of self sovereignty when others completely control what is censored for you against your will or without your knowledge.
Is there a way to know you had been banned/filtered?
Who decides of these banning/filtering?
Will a user bE informed or warned before he/she gets banned?
I say here lol learn to deal with it 🤣 its a free world here ppl start censoring stuff we going backwards just my opinion.. this the wild wild west 😳baby strap up to be in nostr world.. 🤣🤣🤣just my thoughts on that..
Your relay. Your rules.
Some bullshit. For now my relay is only filtering for NIP-05 verification. Judging by the log it's filtering out about 20% of write requests, but that's about 80% of spam messages.
IMO, definitely no. Filtering in general is not spam and its impossible to have a conversation that isn't controlled/filtered. Imagine if there were no standards in your day to day conversation, imagine if you couldn't separate yourself from when those normal standards were thrown out the window by a complete stranger.
The question is about who is doing the blocking and is it for people who *don't* want to see it, or are you trying to stop people who are actively seeking out that information or account from getting it, and why?
I've never actually clicked on a telegram link from a crypto bot, but maybe it's really valuable and I'm preventing people from getting the good news that nobody is talking about?
If I block/mute someone it is NOT censorship.
If someone else can block/mute someone from me it IS censorship.
With self-custodied social identity comes responsibility. Some people may outsource their curation and let someone else decide.
Give me a curated list and let me customize and host it myself, or let me build it from scratch. 🤷♂️
There are those that will never run relays or run a FOSS client. And there are those that will never run a node and verify their transactions.
At least there’s an open market with many options; where trust can be earned and lost.
So definitely not on the client level. I don’t know enough about relays; so I’m not sure if that’s where that option would be best served, or maybe it’s just link to a raw curation list you host at a URL. Clients could allow for that, and it wouldn’t be censorship. Enable self-curation instead.
Whatever the content and regardless the frequency of contact, I'd still call it censorship. It doesn't matter if someone has naught but ill-intent, the message they are attempting to share is being reduced and, thus, censored.
That doesn't mean censorship is a bad thing, so long as you have control over/are in general agreement with what's censored for your personal self, and that's where the reach ends.
We have the choice and the right to block out any content we don't wish to interact with, to our benefit or our detriment. The issue comes in when someone else blocks you from receiving content without your knowledge/consent
Absolutely not.
It’s about leaving the choice to the user. Users can choose by themselves if they want to use relays which do this or not. In Damus users can even choose from which relays they want their global feed to be populated.
If it’s done centrally without disclosure and without leaving the users a choice then yes, it is censorship.