The filtering/blocking approach used by Amethyst today has a few main faults - the primary one being lack of visibility of app wide filtering. People find out by accident, or at all - which is obviously a sign of a broken approach. I don’t quite see it as censorship, yet more as a poorly functioning content ‘value’ scoring system.

The inability to opt-in and customise your filters is really the lacking feature here. I’m actually surprised just how badly the WoT - trusting 5 nth degree following spam reports = shadow ban content - has performed. It shows that close/greater connected individuals (group clusters) regularly have different preferences and desires to self-curate what they see - instead of having it done on their behalf somehow (I.e. WoT signals). People also report or mute for many reasons - from bad content to “I just don’t care about this type of content”. Breaking News: Humans value different things.

Enabling users to self curate more easily and see how far that gets us is the best approach. We can even add filtering for NIP05 domains, or perhaps relays to avoid connecting to. Even content warning, profanity masking, nudity detection, etc. all done locally on devices without major performance impacts.

Damus POC I mocked up. Damus has active development in this area. nostr:note18z7rqv87qt0nu3v0rajf4ghnrqcnnc3ujgeqy3zswgs2nwh3nq3qmwhnlh