Nostr Web Client

Some of the people who've seen what #[0] & I have been proposing in "NIP-69" seem to think the objective is censorship. So to day I sat down and wrote out the bigger "vision" of where I'd like to see content moderation go on Nostr. Feel free to give it a read:

https://s3x.social/nostr-content-moderation

Just realize it's a first draft and needs work. But the point I hope I get across is that I want to see something that's individual and "bottom up". To me censorship is always top down since at the core of censorship is some authority flexing their power and enforcing their idea of what's good and bad - overriding your idea of good and bad.

Instead I want to see a cacophony of voices with individuals choosing which voices in that chaos they want to listen to for filtering their feeds. (Or they could choose to listen to none and see it all.)

But systems have to be put in place to make that a reality. It won't happen by accident.

And yes, the government will always force a certain level of censorship on us. But there are ways around that. For example our relay can't have anything related to escorting on it thanks to FOSTA/SESTA (horrible law), but people who need to do posts related to escorting could use #[1]'s relay. And that's the whole point with Nostr - it's censorship-resistant, not censorship-proof. Nothing is censorship-proof…

Matt Lorentz 2y ago

Nice write-up. I really appreciate your leadership in this area. I think a lot of Bitcoiners are used to skirting KYC laws and think that Nostr can do the same when it comes to moderating content. Ignore the haters, I think many of them are just naive. Stories like the one #[1] gave in his Nostrica talk convert people quickly.

When it comes to responding to moderator reports I would love to see a really decentralized system like TrustNet be applied at the client level in addition to the necessary work at the relay level. After seeing so many Mastodon moderators burn out, and seeing how many people Big Social has working on moderation I think we need a paradigm shift if we really want to scale a decentralized social system. The Secure Scuttlebutt idea of using your peers as an immune system against bad content is revolutionary. We’ve brought Scuttlebutt’s two-hops algorithm into Nos, but something like TrustNet takes it to the next level. https://cblgh.org/trustnet/

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Discussion

s3x_jay 2y ago

That’s a great article! The same basic idea I had, but fully fleshed out. The only thing I wish were in there is the idea of negative trust (e.g. “Do the opposite of whatever Tucker Carlson says to do”).