There will never be a future where evaluating and choosing relays won't be absolutely necessary. There is no freedom if you don't know and control where your content is. If your content is in the same relay as millions of porn posts, your content inst any better than spam. Stop thinking that relays can be hidden. They cannot be.
Discussion
Can you not bootstrap relays by using relays of people you follow?
And if the user blocks authors, identify from which relays they come and then ask the user: relay X has a lot of spam. Do you want to remove it?
That's what the recommended relay section in the relay list page does. But your follows are still using porn relays, which gets recommended to you. Unfortunately, users can't delegate finding good relays for themselves. This notion of using whatever relay the app recommends makes you a slave of the app itself. Not much different than the old Twitter.
And purging relays after you blocked enough users from them?
Why not? I really don't want to see posts by people that are completely outside of my WoT and the client should compute that, not the relay. Relays are a substitute for the "ether" we would ideally be using to broadcast messages in a censorship resistant way. Yes, CSAM is what 99.9% of all users want to avoid in their stream but what if you are into gay porn? Why should the relay decide to delete it *based on the content*. Sure, the current spam attack is posting porn out of context but don't tell me they allow them as top posts or reply to gay people posting gay stuff. And the yoda bot. Yes, you can detect and block it but you probably get false positives as soon as people quote the original post when commenting on it etc. and then people get shadowbanned on our censorship resistant nostr.
You are a client dev. Please don't shy away from fixing this on the client. Calculating a follows score is relatively trivial and to hide media based on this, too. What else is missing? If posts get into my WoT I only need some way to cut off the branch at whoever is open to follow spammers or score based on follower count among my follows. If Alice follows the spammer Eve but nobody else follows Eve, Eve should have a lower score than Bob who all my follows are following.
We don't need a contest for the best censors among the relays, so all agree on that to fight spam.
I am not shying away from fixing. WoT doesn't solve everything as it takes days and sometimes weeks for new users to show up in people's radars even on clients that helped onboard such new users. Imagine onboarding your friend and then trying to find the friend and your client blocking everything.
Regardless of the solution in the client, three is NEVER going to be a future where picking the relay isn't the most important thing users do. There is no solution, no alternative to it. You can pick your relay or be a slave of those who do for you. You cannot have both. Ever.
"never" is a strong word, especially when all-caps 😉
I bet in the very near future, people will rather have their personal AI assistant on their phone judge what is spam than have some central authority preemptively delete events.
Even if you use an AI to filter spam, the central authorities will still delete events. There is no nostr without relays. They are central authorities between you and your friends. They have all the power to shape your reality in anyway they want. Personalized to you.
If you are not careful of which relay you choose, even today, you don't see a lot of criticism to certain projects, for instance. That's why your relay choice matters. Because they can censor you regardless of what the client does.
Yes, absolutely.
I want a world where people have to choose *enough* relays to receive the "broadcasts" while still being manageable for their limited client. Adding more will gradually degrade their experience.
You encourage to pick a minimal set of "good" relays. Adding one wrong relay will occasionally totally ruin their experience and the experience of their followers.
