🚨 PROPOSED SPAM SOLUTION 🚨
Please read, I think this works. Between the ** is a reference from Primal, this is important context for what comes next.
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OK to begin, I noticed that Primal.net/explore lists the following categories of nostr users from the perspective of my pubkey…
1). Follows - accounts you follow
2). Tribe - accounts you follow + your followers
3). Network - accounts you follow + everyone they follow
4). Global - everyone on nostr
Breakdown of the numbers (for me) is as follows
1). Follows = 290
2). Tribe = 1,800
3). Network = 17,723
4). Global = 505,671
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Now “Global” or “Universe” is always prone to spam, because new pubkeys are very cheap and a spammer can easily automate the massive creation of new spam accounts. This has happened several times this year and many of the Global accounts are just one-time-spam pubkeys.
Primal’s category of “3). Network” is much more nuanced and may actually be self correcting.
Network, as defined by Primal is everyone I follow plus everyone they follow. My network is 4% of nostr, but I can grow or trim my own network by following more people or unfollowing people.
If someone in my network starts following spammers and spammers get into my network, I can simply unfollow that original follow pubkey, you can prune your network to cut out all the spam. This is self policing and encourages people not to follow spammers, or they will likely be unfollowed en mass.
Even if a spammer created a sophisticated network of pubkeys all with lots of fake follows and followers, this spam network would not bisect with my network unless one of my followers started following the spammers. If this happens, I can instantly fix this by simply unfollowing the fool in my network.
I think this works at unlimited scale and is actually very very simple. It is an example of an emergent system. A simple set of rules that cause complex higher order results.
The only drawback is genuine new humans finding their first follow. But they should be able to do this outside nostr, as it’s a 1 time kick start to their nostr keys gaining traction in the main network.
Have I explained this clearly enough to follow?
Would a couple of social graph pictures help?
