Speech isn’t free unless the free defend it.

It’s certainly true that people are more open about FOSS on Nostr but also that’s the kind of theme that will get shadow banned on X. So hard to do apple to apple comparison.

Mention Nostr on Twitter once. That will kill your audience. Then private message eveyody your npub. Delete your account.

Good morning!

In Spain they want to implement digital identification to access social networks and the Internet.

All parties agree

For those who don't know, months ago they did it with porn.

#Nostr

Who decides what to censor as spam?

Nostr and Lens solve the "spam and scam" problem by having the client decide. For example Amethyst for android will hide posts from accounts that others report as scams. These "others" are defined by people you follow, but this essentially puts it up to a community vote of large influencers to silence you.

On Lens, once you're labeled spam, you appear in the "show more" of comments. This is a huge turn-off to new users with no followers, who are treated like lower class citizens.

Farcaster solves it in a similar way, but by having the official team label it, and then since their client is so large and influential, their list is often distributed to other clients. This is absolutely horrible and way too centralized. While it's true that posts to your followers would still show up, they are effectively silencing your comments.

Session has zero censorship for mass DMs in the way I use it, even under outright sanctions. The nodes don't even know I am the sender, and I'm assigned new receivers if they drop me. That's why I like it. But the market likes simpleX more because it rotates encryption keys, so it's tough to get new followers. Can't fight the market.

Bastyon solves the problem by a community vote for outright illegal content, to get it off the nodes, such as child porn and narcotics sales. The voters are picked based on their total upvotes, called "reputation". I disagree with this approach, as if we're going to vote, it should be the nodes hosting it (like Arweave does)...

Files on Arweave have an unofficial vote, where the nodes can opt out of storing it. And if all the miners chosen in a block opt out, then there's no financial penalty for dropping the content. But if they have the content and others don't, then they have a financial advantage to mine that block over competitors. This approach is good for websites, but for a social network with permissionless replies, it's way too passive.

Therefore:

I disagree with all these solutions.

In my view, the best way to handle spam (in a permissionless system) is to allow the original poster to decide which replies are spam. Then the end user can decide to toggle on or off "criticism and spam" for the replies. After all, if you're following someone, you trust their judgment on the subject they are speaking about. And this decentralizes the decision to each individual poster.

Now I do the ironic thing, and turn it over to my replies. Do you think this approach is right?

gm☺️☕️☀️

Looks like it was delicious

I had a thought the other day...

Governments get involved in all the financial transactions in order to tax them. Your company makes money, it gets taxed. You get paid a salary from the remainder, it gets taxed again. You spend it on something, it gets taxed again. That company takes it in and it gets taxed again. Over and over, tax after tax after tax. And all of this requires complete loss of privacy, they have to know all of your transactions so they can tax them accordingly, and the accounting and compliance costs spawn a huge financial industry which is actually.... entirely unnecessary.

Instead, all this loss of privacy, all this compliance cost, all the tedious filling out of tax forms where you aren't sure if you are doing it right and they hope you do it wrong so they can also collect fines and interest... the whole thing could go away.

And I'm not talking about anarchy. I'm talking about a funded government that doesn't need to collect taxes.

Just use inflation: The central bank prints 3% more money each year and gives it to the government.

Now before you all yell at me about how inflation is a horrible thing... this is a compromise. It is far better than the invasive tax systems we have today, and if the amount of money government gets is fixed by a constitution, and the fiat system (there would still be one) didn't expand via fractional reserve lending but only by this predictable monetary inflation, it strongly prevents government overgrowth, and also moderates boom-bust interest rate cycles, and still stimulates economic activity because the currency continues to lose value.

This is just the start of a crazy thought. I haven't thought it through deeply. But I do really like getting rid of the invasive tax compliance back-monkey.