Indeed. Relays that rate limit to the point of being unusable ought to be avoided. 🤝
Discussion
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.