c’hai le storie – Radio Blackout 105.25FM: Potere e resistenza nei territori acquatici
Pagina web episodio: https://radioblackout.org/podcast/potere-e-resistenza-nei-territori-acquatici/
File multimediale: https://radioblackout.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/acqua.mp3
sei di Torino (che ascolti radio blackout)?
That's a clear mistake in the current form of Nostr. There is no way to say "I am not interested in this or that topic" other than muting people. But mute is a lot more aggressive.
In a web of trust, no one follows the impersonator. So his mass reports have no value. Same discourse for any sybil network. Only trusted (followed) people contribute to a WoT score.
Yes, the most important innovation of Nostr lies in its decentralized model, which is both simple and effective. Features like Zaps are appealing, but ultimately they are add-ons, functionality that could be integrated into other platforms as well.
Decentralized distribution is a foundational aspect of the protocol, something that must be built into the architecture from the ground up.
🇺🇸 Trump's Truth Social goes down. I guess the retaliation is beginning. https://nostr.download/a43ef71fd024004d9d5e78503dc54abe6557e6e1ad9bfc4a84abad2a70b734bb.webp
Yes, restricting PoW to users outside the WoT is a thing, and makes somewhat sense.
But still I don't understand why not captchas or similar in this scenario. These are more effective than PoW, as they burn human mental resources, not just cheap CPU cycles, and are hard to automate.
PoW is effective in the context of DDoS attacks, where an attacker generates millions of connections in a short time. In such cases, even a small computational cost per request, when multiplied by millions, becomes significant for the attacker, but remains manageable for legitimate users.
Spam, however, is a different problem. A spammer publishing just 1,000 notes per hour could still inflict substantial damage on Nostr relays, overwhelming storage and flooding the relay global feed. In this case, the computational cost of PoW (especially at < difficulty levels) is negligible for the attacker and not a meaningful deterrent.
The situation is much closer to the email spam problem, where PoW was also explored and ultimately abandoned due to its ineffectiveness. In fact, Nostr's case is arguably simpler from the spammer’s perspective: notes are public, require no targeting, and have virtually no delivery constraints.
So my initial point remains: NIP-13 is unlikely to be effective as a spam prevention mechanism, just as PoW proved ineffective against spam emails.
So I now understand that Tor nodes can enable PoW as a defense mechanism against DDoS attacks, as described in
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec/-/blob/main/proposals/327-pow-over-intro.txt
The goal is to mitigate connection-level flooding, such as when a botnet with thousands of compromised machines overwhelms onion services by initiating millions of introduction requests.
This is fundamentally a DDoS prevention mechanism, not an anti-spam strategy.
In contrast, if (or when?) Nostr relays are flooded with millions of spammy notes per second, one might consider applying a similar PoW-based throttle—e.g., requiring a 20-bit PoW, which takes about one second to compute. This would theoretically reduce the spam rate to thousands of notes per second per spammer node.
Would this actually be effective as an anti-spam?
Yes, that's likely the greatest feature of Nostr: the identity is not tied to a single specific server. Mastodon is obsolete with its server-side account design.
Interesting. I will search and read about that.
But I don't think you can wait 10 minutes of intensive computing on a smartphone to just send a message - it would make nostr unusable, and onboarding almost impossible.
Yes, it depends on definitions. If you just look strictly to the protocol, it is different, with different principles, and it does not interoperate natively.
Interoperability comes at a different level.
You can say it is different (yes, it is, of course), but in practice they interoperate.
I do not agree that a bridge is a hack. It is a clever piece of software with lot's of design details.
Multiaccount is good for the closed silos of the corp.web - the open web can be better, with messages going through different protocols with bidirectional interoperability
In Tor I don't know how PoW is used.
Bitcoin is different. PoW is the goal of the game of signing a block. Every miner competes to complete the PoW before the others, and the first who completes wins and appends the next block. You cannot move this schema to relays. There is no "competitive game" to publish the next note or anything similar.
There is no PoW barrier high enough for spammers with dedicated machines.
Being horribly slow would only penalize legitimate users, not spammers.
From a usability perspective, 60s would be a terrible user-experience design.
And that would not have any significant impact on spammers, that's the point.
Why would it make any difference waiting for 10s, if the spamming server is a dedicated machine? The enrgy cost on the spammer side would be negligible.
Ok, let me make an example.
In the paper the cost is in $, but let's simplify and use time. Let's say that we want a high PoW barrier, like 60s (average) to send an event to Nostr relays using a smartphone. Let's say that the same message costs on a server something like 10s, as the server is more powerful.
So the Nostr user will be pissed ok by waiting 60s to send a message, which will also drain his smartphone batteries.
On the other hand, the dedicated server of the spammer will send 8640 spam messages per day, flooding Nostr relays. And that's assuming the spammer has a single machine, but in reality could be a srvrfarm.
You can reduce the cost and make it even easier for the spammer.
For Tor I am not sure.
Bitcoin is very different: PoW is a competitive game to sign a block, it is not an antispam. There is no parallel to a messaging system.
I disagree on that. Bridges embody the “protocols, not platforms” philosophy, extending the reach of Nostr into the Fediverse. And while it's technically correct that Nostr isn't natively part of the Fediverse (in the sense of speaking ActivityPub), the bridges means that from a user's perspective, Nostr content can flow into and out of the Fediverse ecosystem. That interoperability is more meaningful than theoretical protocol alignment.
It works like that: spammers are going to operate using powerful servers with lots of computing resources and minimal energy constraints—that's the nature of their activity. In contrast, legitimate users often rely on smartphones or low-powered devices.
This creates a fundamental problem for PoW as a spam mitigation strategy: there’s no viable threshold that can effectively hinder spammers without also significantly impairing regular users.
Bitcoin is very different, as its use of PoW is fundamentally different: it’s a competitive system where miners race to solve a game in a winner-takes-all model. That schema does not make sense in a microblogging protocol like Nostr.
Nostr is already part of the Fediverse, thanks to the bridges. And frankly it is one of the best feature it has at the moment.
And Fediverse is about freedom. But technically speaking Mastodon is built on older technology. It lacks certain capabilities that Nostr offers, such as client-side identity, replication, and cryptographic signatures.
That's why Nostr has greater theoretical potential, but this potential has yet to be fully realized in practice.
And Nostr polarized/small userbase is an issue for its growth.