I feel you. Unfortunately, I think there is lots of hypocrisy. A lot of the “no algos ever” people actually love(d) Primal and their Trending feed.
The truth is everyone wants a perfect world. No censorship but no annoying spam (or people saying mean things to me), decentralization but fast performance, no follower counts but also follower counts.
I think it’s a lot more nuanced than the average user is willing to admit.
Give the user option to turn it off. Solved
But the user already has that option! It’s a separate feed they have to select. Just don’t use Primal’s “Trending” feed if you don’t like it.
I am talking about spam and shadowbanning.
The shadow banning is only on the Trending feed, so just don’t use it.
Spam is a separate issue since Primal uses a centralized cache. I presume they need to filter spam on ingest to keep their cache fast and scalable so there is not way to turn that part off. You’d need to use a different client without a centralized cache or run your own caching service.
But why ban it in the first place? If it is trending, let it be, why fuck with it?
Theres a few reasons! You can read some of the posts from nostr:npub16c0nh3dnadzqpm76uctf5hqhe2lny344zsmpm6feee9p5rdxaa9q586nvr explaining their reasoning.
Main ones were:
1. Adult accounts (they don’t want those in the trending feed, understandable whether you agree or not)
2. Semisol was creating “fake” trending events by creating fake reactions/replies/zaps/etc so they blocked his npub.
Again, if you’re trying to build a functional “trending notes” view, these are reasonable steps to take not “censorship”.
If there are adult contents you don’t want to see, mute it and refresh the list, why ban it altogether? What if I am a pervert and I want to see it? Let the user decide. Period.
