IMO the solution is more relays with smarter filters
nostr is something on the line between p2p and federated
i'm not sure if there even needs to really be relay lists, this could be derived from user's in/outboxxes only
i'm pretty sure there is going to be several parts of this protocol that get abandoned because stupid, and some of them central, but i don't think that much more will change out of 1, except a couple of things
Need relay tools with a gui. I'm willing to mess with command line on a good day, but even that much is out of the question for most people. I think something great can come from this relay model, but right now I don't see it. The amount of control I have over my own relay is limited enough that it wouldn't make a difference to me if the whole thing was centralized. And that's not even addressing the problem of identity theft. IMO nostr has made identity theft easier for the bad guys.
part of my solution has been to make use of the existing data
realy now has a simple moderation interface where you designate npubs whose follow and mute lists rule the relay, and done
this can of course be quite easily implemented by actually following active real accounts and not just ones made for the realy, but you can also even make chatbots then that add and remove follows and mutes according to the command of the actual relay moderators, and automatic payment systems
i'm just in the middle of getting this working, just ironing out some mingw issues right now, but i've also thought about other problems, and i'm trying to layer them up in a logical way, some ideas need further tooling but some ideas are simple additions, and i am trying to focus on implementing things that are simpler first because the complicated things are complicated... one of them involves aggregator services that search for events of a specific kind and related to specific users, but this is a lot more than useful, important baseline things like controlling access and database management basics
also, i'm thinking of stuff around user queries... like, when the relay does a query, it should find the user's mute list and remove those npubs from any results...
that's not as straight simple as it sounds, since if that query is done every time it's gonna get expensive, there needs to be a cache that keeps recent queries for a time and so when a user is active their mute lists are hot data and can be used to remove items from their queries automatically
as it should be, why should i pay data limit to download my enemy posts?
A little tool that suggests labels for any new event could be helpful. Might work well with that event type aggregator your building. I'd like that built into the client, but I also am imagining it sorting all the events a relay sees and applying a speculative label regardless of how the originator labelled it.
i think that these kinds of tools are impractical
right now they are subsidised as fuck by VCs and governments, but what happens when the energy cost of AIs actually come up to real marginal cost? yeah, no.
