I also think it’s important for public relays to exist, for people who can’t or don’t want to pay, or for new accounts with no social network.
I would prefer to implement features that mitigate automated spam, while remaining open to human users. Adaptive throttling is already implemented. What other ideas are effective?
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Embedding the note didn’t work as I expected. *sigh*
I've always thought requiring one POW event to whitelist your pubkey was a great idea. But there is no way for clients to know this is what your relay wants right now. You could do an AUTH and in the message tell the user to do this, but most clients don't let users set a POW on their message. So there is some NIP work to be done first I think. But that allows anybody to use the relay anonymously, and gives you a way to seriously throttle spam at the same time.
I’m not sold on POW because if it can be automated, the spammers will eventually implement it.
My relays already throttle unauthenticated clients, and double the throttling each time an unauthed client tries to save an event. This mitigates some spam, since the spammers haven’t figured out authentication, yet.
Spammers demonstrate that they’re willing to waste resources — they will keep retrying infinitely, even if the event is rejected each time. Automated IP blocking might be the best tool.
