Mastodon is a cesspool. https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/24/23806093/mastodon-csam-study-decentralized-network
Discussion
Big time. Biiiig part of the reason I don't run an instance anymore. Granted with any open and free network its bound to be an issue at some point.
right. this could absolutely happen on nostr. and we don't have any tools, by design, to stop it. we can just mute/block and move on. relay operators could get contacted by authorities to remove content though.
I hope this doesn’t happen to nostr
on a permissionless protocol it's more or less guaranteed to happen
Is there anything preventing this sort of thing happening on #Nostr?
No, just go through my block list...
nope. we don't have moderation. anything goes. even the bad stuff.
Sort of, yes. Images are one of the Achille's heels of censorship resistance on nostr. Text notes can be forever through though the use of multiple relays, but images links are a single point of failure. The media host can delete the image or if the host itself is the bad actor the host can be taken down. For the most part so far we are only using a handful of image servers (nostr.build, void.cat, etc) nip-94/95 somewhat "solve" that but it falls into the category of:
Unless I'm wrong here and there is already a way to change where an image link is pointed?
I'm kind of curious if it might actually make it easier to find/delete CSAM images (although and other images as well)
Scrape a relay for all image links and either through AI detection, manual human scrolling, or a combination of both flag images that need to be reported. Now who is going to do this? IDK.
This is one of the reasons that I'm not even looking into the possibility of running a relay. Dealing with unsurmountable juridical issues is nothing I want to dedicate any of my precious time to...
I have been a Fediverse (the Fediverse predates Mastodon) member since 2009, and I have almost never seen anything that would be illegal in the USA. Each nation has different rules, so for example, I don’t follow anyone from the big Japanese instances, because they allow things that other nations don’t. Likewise, the USA allows things that many other nations don’t.
This article is mostly FUD. If you don’t follow or interact with people on instances that allow such things, you never have to worry about running into it. I also think almost every instance has a “we call the cops” policy for such situations.
i think the same argument can be made on Nostr as well, ‘some instances can share their content, we are not relaying that, if you want to do just use the wss’
the question is how do we get out of this dilemma
ouch, that’s nasty, how are nostrich approaching this tipping point?
i know about the architecture behind the protocol but what about if a dominant part that uses the protocols for things like this, will it be okay or would you tale mastodon stance?
We can't do anything about it when and if those nasty people come to Nostr. Censorship resistant technology works for both good people and bad people.
To sharpen the adversarial thinking a bit… If people explore Nostr using large relays, malicious noters can get those relays into trouble with illegal content, right? But, if Nostr were instead made up of lots of small, highly permissioned relays “for me and my buddies,” search and discovery would be much harder, right?
Forgive my nontechnical speak, and feel free to sharpen this further if I’m not understanding well.
Doesn’t this come with the territory of no moderation or little moderation though? I feel like the very same thing will happen here eventually
It does. Mastodon isn't unique here.
The best we can do is block, boycott and denounce them whenever we can. Freedom always comes with these tradeoffs