At Nostrica I asked about preventing spam on my free relay, and speaker suggested a paid relay.
I don't like this answer, because it only allows bitcoiners to use the relay.
It was also suggested (not by speaker) that I ban China (biggest source of spam)... But chinese friends need Nostr the most.
What is the middle ground here?
Limit number of posts per npub or ip?
Implement AUTH with POW?
The middle ground is that you require proof of work for free users, allowing paid users to bypass the work.
I agree that making a relay operator do spam prevention, basically as a full time job, is a great way to repeat the mistakes of SMTP.
But our focus, as a community, on mobile clients at this time makes it difficult to pursue without alot of pain in the UX. I think we need to get serious about spam, though. Before natural protocol ossification happens.
I like this approach. Either pay me 10 sats or do one annoying 5 step captcha probably deletes 99.9% of spam on the relay.
Could a part of the captcha also be doing some work rating and janitoring the "flagged as spam"/""sensitive content" inbox of your relay?As somekind of pre-filter
Are you referring to NIP-13: Proof of Work? It is interesting.
Not exactly. That scheme has the work verification happen at the clients, allowing a filtering by users for what has sufficient work. I'm not all that excited about that kind of scheme. The relays need the help with spam, not the clients, if we're going to avoid the mistakes of SMTP.
