GM!

I've been thinking about the bot issue. It only takes one follower in your WoT who follows a bot (and probably doesn’t realise it) to ruin it. Asking for proof of life when you follow someone is impractical to say the least.

I guess the main way to identify a bot is through their actions — spamming accounts or the same account (aka ReplyGuy). So what if there was an option for auto-unfollowing an npub if they sent the same message to more than [n] accounts or [n] times to the same account? Maybe an option to choose how much of the spam message needs to be identical to qualify.

I realise this doesn’t stop bots who generate random gibberish notes to each spamee (if that’s a word) but it could make a difference. It could also remove a bunch of follows if the tolerance is set too low so maybe a warning would be good if it went below a certain level.

I’m just spitballing. I also have no idea if it’s even possible. What do people think? Could this help?

#asknostr #nostr #spam #bots #grownostr

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Discussion

I am on #amethyst and do not see any replyguys anymore.

Nice but I’m not on Android so can’t use the Amethyst app.

How?

It is just like this. I do not know why.

The immediate solution to #ReplyGuy and #ReplyGal is client side filtering, though that may not be as universal as some would like. The soon but not quite yet solution is implementation and adoption of NIP-13 for #ProofOfWork. Set the #PoW difficulty high enough to make bulk spamming expensive but low enough that users shouldn't have too much difficulty.

It will be very interesting to see how the #spam problem gets solved, if it even can be solved.

It’s not like spam is a new problem. The way the problem of spam was solved in the past was: centralization.

Stopping spam is by definition “censorship”. #nostr is by design censorship resistant.

It seems that to fix the spam problem in #nostr would necessarily undermine the greatest features that #nostr has.