Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I may be interested in learning more about bitcoin and crypto, but that may be because I’m a man. Statically, I’m more likely to be interested in learning more about it than women, who tend find the subject to be off-putting. I think we need all kinds of voices and perspectives reflected on any platform that we hope to become a true public square with protected free speech. I’m perhaps a little worried that groups of people who just aren’t interested in btc, or knowing how the sausage is made on nostr might come here and quickly bounce out when they mistakenly take the platform to be for crypto heads only. I like the idea of this platform in principle but I’m not seeing a lot of the types of voices I enjoy seeing on other similar centralized platforms. Maybe we need some big celebrity endorsements over here? Sad to see so many people flooding to Bluesky and not here. Do those kinds of people like safe bubbles and censorship? I hope not. Maybe centralized is just more turnkey or easy to understand for someone coming from twitter/x?
Discussion
Nostr needs more varying conversations and opinions. It's too narrow now, but that's only because someone has to be first. Hopefully the conversations grow and expand to include everything and everyone. You're just early. Welcome.
This is natural evolution of all protocols, so it’s nothing to be concerned with in the long term, imo. Go back to Usenet: nothing but data hoarding nerds. Back to TCP/IP, nothing but protocols devs. Back to RSS, IRC, etc it is always the same story. In this case it’s just that the same community who were first to #Bitcoin (not crypto, btw, that’s a common misunderstanding, long story) were also the most motivated to build a better, censorship resistant means to share and communicate.
The expansion of content and conversation will happen naturally, it just requires the first stage of those willing to take the risk, and post the content that others will want while the network for those things is still small.
There is a bigger hurdle, but also far greater benefit to being early in the network. So post whatever you are interested in and you might make a lot more of a difference than you might think. 🫡
How does nostr control for bots?
Nothing at the protocol layer. Just handled by relays, users, and clients with varied approaches. I suspect the best long term approach will be web-of-trust related. But you can report them to relays and they will ban or limit certain types of access. Some relays share how they treat things like that or specifically use WoT as their filter and you can add those relays, etc.
Bunch of different options, probably standards will emerge with enough time and after we learn from a few really annoying bot attacks. Only had one or two significant ones so far.