Haven't seen them for ages

What kind of spam you see?

Here's my canned response about dealing with spam:

If you are seeing a lot of spam in your replies, it is because you are reading from relays that spammers can write to for free.

Spam will always be present on any social platform or protocol when the following statements are true: 1. It's free and easy to create new identities. 2. New identities can write messages they can expect others will see without a cost.

We're not able to, nor do we want to, make it difficult to create a new identity on Nostr, so reducing spam by making new users jump through hoops to create an "account" that can only be enforced by a centralized entity is not an option.

That means we need to prevent it via option 2, by restricting new identities from writing notes to relays without a cost. If you are reading from relays that don't impose some cost to write to them, either social, computational, or monetary, then you are bound to see spam on a regular basis.

Instead of reading from free and public relays, you should consider trading them out for the following types of relays:

- Web-of-Trust (WoT): This relay type imposes a social cost in order to write to it. Namely, you have to be followed by the relay owner or one of the npubs the relay owner follows before you can write notes to the relay. These types of relays may also automatically aggregate notes from those within the web-of-trust, even if they were written to other relays.

- Proof-of-Work (PoW): This relay type is less common, and it imposes a computational cost to write to it. Only those who have dedicated computational energy to generating the required PoW can write to the relay. This cost is trivial for the honest user, who only posts up to a couple times a minute, but imposes heavy costs on spammers, who are trying to post hundreds or thousands of times per minute. Unfortunately, most Nostr clients don't support adding PoW to notes, so most relays don't use it as a spam mitigation measure.

- Paid Relays: As the name implies, this relay type imposes a monetary cost to write to it. It may also impose a cost to read from it, but that is less common. Since this cost is per npub, and spammers don't ever use just one npub since that's too trivial to mute and move on, this makes paid relays affordable for honest users, but too expensive for spammers.

Since the only two relay types above that are currently in wide use are web-of-trust and paid relays, here are a few suggestions for each.

Web-of-Trust:

- wot.utxo.one

- nostrelites.org

- wot.nostr.net

Paid:

- nostr.wine

- nostr.land

- jellyfish.land