For an actually dumb “spam bot” (something posting pre-written texts over several thousand threads a day), PoW + WoT demolish that problem, and Nostr somewhat has this already, albeit it is not highly adopted, which makes it more a Client problem than a Protocol problem (and I’m saying this as a Nostr Client dev myself);
Most clients do not seem to have PoW verification options, and WoT relays are still very exclusive and new, see https://trust.nostr.band/ for example.
Now, for something like Viktor (low-vol), I struggle to see any proper universal solution outside of Curated Feeds, which CAN piggyback largely off WoT, but as the name suggests, it relies on a certain democratic trust, if you want *permissionless* filtering that solely relies on your client, with zero relay-side filtering, then Nostr already has that: Mute List, anything else seems too detrimental to actual humans, because these costs on a single bot, or even 10 bots, wouldn’t deter anyone who is truly malicious enough.
It would be interesting though, so see Shared Mute Lists, perhaps assembled through weighted community submissions and votes, but you’d need a Proof of Humanity system for that, bringing you back to square one…
Personally, I find Mute Lists satisfy my needs, pure client-side with zero relay influence, I have been in the P2P/Crypto space most of my life, so self-curation is natural, I’ve blocked probably 200+ porn bots here, it doesn’t deter me from being a Nostr user - for the people it would deter? Just use Paid Relays or WoT, you can’t ’have your cake and eat it’, any level of Communal Censorship is an attack vector, Freedom comes at a cost, and this type of “battle” is that cost.
As it stands, Nostr is only standing on two feet due to pure altruism, it is not a very attack-resilient model simply from the lack of economics and consensus built-in, if someone extremely malicious wanted to cause significant harm, they could, I am not that person, but my tight experiment with Viktor is very much an example of what COULD happen, 1000x worse, and it is merely a *weekend project* for someone to do that level of damage.
Side Note: Viktor now intelligently auto-blacklists users that explicitly do not want him in their posts/threads, currently, that blacklist is 213 npubs, including yours, and he has a much tighter “range of topics” he will respond to, reducing spaminess, he WILL still respond if you explicitly tag him, however, that right nostr:npub1gwfpm6l8fhn6rs83j8rjjnjgkdqv89chd2fdhy6zc2uvpuwf39vsfuxxee ?
