I think it makes sense. If you're not already trusted by the relay, you and your messages sit in the waiting room until they're reviewed by the relay owner/curator.
Discussion
I would even say that we need two layers here. One to release all events signed by a certain npub you t4ust and other to review events signed by anims one by one. Blog comment moderation style.
Whitelist = auto-approved
Blacklist = auto-disapproved
Graylist = waiting room
What do you guys think about using Badges like this for relay access?
I prefer NIP-05, but that also works.
I can't do invites with NIP-05
yes you can. you can create a nip05 on someone's behalf, they dont need to have it in their kind0
Of course, but then I need an API so that people who already have a nip-05 can create (pending) nip-05s from within my apps.
Or if need an event for a Nip-05 invite or sth. But then the relay had to look at events as well and then the Badge solution wins.
Members need to able to invite others by directly handing them out write access. But only one level deep.
With nip-05 that gets complex fast
any source of access can be part of the Web Of Access (WOA). i am unsure about badges, i couldn't figure out from reading the spec if they were revokeable, but i assume you thought of this..
How do we handle waiting room though? Since signed event dates can't be changed, if a user publishes one day then a few days or even hours later the note will get burried by any client that shows chronological right? So if it takes an operator days to respond, any social even its basically unseen. I say this as it just seems like either get on the whitelist or don't bother posting to said relay unless the operator responds quickly.
I could see this being more useful for content that doesn't require timing.
Your relay could just keep track of the waiting list IDs and the time they were first known to the relay. You need to keep a list, right?
I suppose, but I'd also assume that clients use the note time to display notes not relying on the relay to return notes in any known ordering. So clients displaying chronological notes would burry old notes.
Oh, yes, but that's the problem of the person who didn't get themselves whitelisted.
Right but then why bother with the grey-list then? Just whitelist or don't share the notes I guess. No one is going to check if their notes are propagating on relays, they just hit send and hope they get reach, but sitting in a greylist you'd just sit there wondering why your note never got reach. Grey-list meaning it requires manual human intervention, otherwise it's still just a whitelist/blacklist with spam-filters. How many relay operators will be minute-level attentive for social feeds? We both know that nostr is highly time based right now. There are all kinds of dates and times that are optimal to get even just your closer friends to see your notes.
We're moving away from that strict chronology. And it's worth waiting, to appear under an article in a magazine.
Think of this from the relay operator’s perspective as well. You care less about immediately releasing someone else's content and more about filtering out bots and weird stuff, but there may be new people writing interesting content worth spreading around.
If they do it often enough, you’ll eventually whitelist their npub. But if there’s no grey middle ground, you’re forced to choose between allowing by default (and risking the spread of awful content) or blacklisting by default (and creating a bubble).
Another way to look at it is the GitHub-like PR model: send enough helpful PRs and you may eventually gain write privileges my repo. IMO, this is a fair middle ground for moderation.
I agree with you that this should be mentioned somewhere to make users aware that their notes might remain in limbo for a while...Maybe via NIP-11.
As for making sure operators don’t simply forget about notes, maybe daily reminder emails? That’s what Mastodon offers.
I think it's going to take me a bit to get comfortable with the usefulness if this proposition. I agree with the argument, but still not sure it works in the benefit of the user any more than simply begging for the operator to whitelist them, to which the operator would look at their past notes stored on another relay perhaps and choose to authorized them.
Not to mention were simply discussing non-paid public relays I suppose. This also only works if the number of notes to review is low enough to interact. I think were just discussing a human high-level filter.
I guess my final thought is, does my opinion matter here? This sounds like a relay feature/implementation detail. The relay should allow for this to be enabled/disabled and offer an admin interface for implementing this.
My whole software dev MO is optional features. Build it, but let me turn it off/on.
> As for making sure operators don’t simply forget about notes, maybe daily reminder emails? That’s what Mastodon offers.
Also who am I to say what the operator _should_ do. What I do know is what I would do, and that's check it whenever I have a few seconds of "free" time. It would probably never happen, so that's my bias!
On my side, I was thinking more about personal or small community relays. But honestly, even at scale, it’s either a big team of human reviewers or a mix of that and algorithms à la big tech social mefis (and given the current state of things, I’d much prefer to go back to the army of mods).
My take is: give operators the tools and let them decide.
Want to whitelist everyone by default? Fine.
Want to blacklist everybody but yourself by default? Also fine.
Want a moderation queue? Here you go.
Want to be notified about new items to review? No problem, just let me know the level of granularity you want for notifications.
This is what we can do on the relay development side without imposing our own views.
I just want to see replies from strangers, without letting them use the relay to send material that would get me in trouble. Maybe I never 'release' their notes. How bad would it be? All of their followers will still see their reply (posted to their outbox as well as my inbox). Only my followers would not see it. Unless of course I wanted to reply to it, in which case I would release it and reply.
You are right it is a problem. I've always felt bad about this aspect, that I was breaking other people's experience. But I can't think of another way to be sure that I'm not going to get in trouble.
We need more thinking on this area.