Bots ruined Twitter, amongst other things. Hopefully won’t be as bad on here
Discussion
Paid & private relays can filter these out but they can appear on larger open relays.
Personally I expect it to get out of hand once the platform gets more real users, but since its so decentralized the solutions for that will also be decentral.
So what the exact solutions will look like is to be seen, but I assume a mix of verified relays, Web of trust (Nostrudel has this where you only see content from people you follow, who they follow, and who the people they follow follow) and just general anti spam detection. I wrote a basic anti spam detection for a prototype I made to, and it actually caught a surprising amount just by monitoring how quickly accounts post and how similar their messages are.
Good stuff. It’ll play out its own way as more and more join. So far nowhere near as bad as other platforms; hopefully stays that way
I have a good feeling that eventually the platform will win, because the worse the spam gets the better people will get at combating the spam.
If theres not that big of an issue and people donate their time to the clients and relays that just means that the current tools are considered good enough, if it changes the usual response is to develop better tools. Same happened on Matrix.org (not nostr) when it had a child porn spam attack across the platform where rogue bots were inviting all their users to those rooms (No idea if it was actually in there as the title of the room was enough for me to know that I should never join it). They developed new tools to ban that quicker, tightened federation of insecure instances and developed better moderation tools for the rooms. Now it hasn't happened in a while there.