If you are seeing lots of replyguy spam make sure you aren’t casting a massive net and adding a bunch of public relays with no rate limiting to your relay list. Keep a smaller list of relays that you trust. If it’s a public relay, ask the operator what kinds of spam protections are enabled.
Think “know your farmer” aka “know your relay operator“.
I’ve seen so many accounts with like 30 public relays. You’re just asking to get spammed 😅
Maybe one day you can do this and clients spam protections will handle everything, but we’re not there yet.
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Replies (73)
I suppose it's nice that Reply Guy always mentions the relay.
What spam protections do you have enabled, trusted relay operator?
Would be dope to be able to know from which relays a certain note comes from…
I haven’t added any relays. I’m just using the default ones. I haven’t *seen* the spam replies after the first day.
I wrote and run
which does ip ratelimiting. You can only post 6 notes a minute, although I should drop that since damus is good at retrying writes and spammers are not
GitHub
GitHub - damus-io/noteguard: A high-performance rust-based plugin system for strfry
A high-performance rust-based plugin system for strfry - damus-io/noteguard
Can someone smart make an easy tutorial vid on these things? I'm not annoyed enough to put in the effort.
If you are seeing lots of replyguy spam make sure you aren’t casting a massive net and adding a bunch of public relays with no rate limiting to your relay list. Keep a smaller list of relays that you trust. If it’s a public relay, ask the operator what kinds of spam protections are enabled.
Think “know your farmer” aka “know your relay operator“.
I’ve seen so many accounts with like 30 public relays. You’re just asking to get spammed 😅
Maybe one day you can do this and clients spam protections will handle everything, but we’re not there yet.
View quoted note →
Yeah damus is one of the few clients that doesn’t make room on disk to store this info, but should at least keep an in memory cache…
Its an interesting attack, same as in email protocol. For now muting works. I guess spamlists from trusted parties will be one of the solutions for the future mixed with some sorts of filters ...
I'm confused about this. If I set five relays and others are not connected at all to the relays I use, how will they see my posts? Please help me understand
Shake your relay operators hand 🤝
They won’t, at least in damus’ current model. This is either a feature or not depending on your use case.
Future versions will have autopilot which will just work without having any manual configuration
Can see a bunch of reply guys on the default settings of Damus. See zero on Primal.
I would like to see at least one client that surfaces a “selector” that allows the user to select to see notes from just a single relay or from however many check marked.
This way I can jump between relays without nuking thin from my relay list.
In the future I could see this changing the entire Nostr experience, sort of like “changing flavors”.
Damus allows you to configure different read relays so you may or may not considering your relay setup. With primal they only read from their relay so they can censor anything they want
the crazy replay guy has been striking a lot of people. it was mentioned in the fediverse a few times — This is a comment on: https://yakihonne.com/flash-news/nevent1qqspqjkzcnxu97zqfzjkans2vkm7xu5a4jym26nup5g2h5h94uhep9szyqewrqnkx4zsaweutf739s0cu7et29zrntqs5elw70vlm8zudr3y2qcyqqqqqqgqym24c
Is there an easy way to know which relay some people are connected to so I can use the same relays?
Wait, wut? Primal client 'only' reads from Primal relay?
The whole “know your operator” seems like a terrible (and unrealistic) idea.
Its temporary until clients are better
I think the issue is people believe they will get to see the most content and their content will be pushed out farther so joining multiple relays seemed like a good idea.
Yeah we could have a separate read and write configuration but honestly most people won’t want to deal with that
Well, it works. But that's what ReplyGuy is doing too.
Agreed, just stating why I believe people made that decision. Which I don’t fault as I believe it could potentially incentive people to primarily use 3-5 main relays which long-term is problematic
If it’s a private relay for a community it’s totally fine no? But agree that large public relay operators could potentially become targets. Gotta decentralize and let the nym shift normalize
Permissionless protocols that don't take spam seriously become unusable.
Thabkfully, no one here is pretending it's all valid use of Nostr and thus inciting us to inaction.
However, Bitcoin is the most important protocol of our lives in many ways and the gas lightning around the spam it suffers has been sadly very effective.
Very few take it seriously or imagine fee markets for block space are somehow sufficient when they clearly aren't.
If you are seeing lots of replyguy spam make sure you aren’t casting a massive net and adding a bunch of public relays with no rate limiting to your relay list. Keep a smaller list of relays that you trust. If it’s a public relay, ask the operator what kinds of spam protections are enabled.
Think “know your farmer” aka “know your relay operator“.
I’ve seen so many accounts with like 30 public relays. You’re just asking to get spammed 😅
Maybe one day you can do this and clients spam protections will handle everything, but we’re not there yet.
View quoted note →
coracle does that
Correct. Public relays should be able to disappear without notice, and the user experience should continue like nothing happened.
🤙
Wait, wut?
Is it in Settings?
create a "relay" feed.
but it doesn't give big amounts of notes. maybe several notes and then it shows the past. dunno what is happening. @hodlbod
I use a shitload of relays. Also ReplyGuy really doesn't bother me. It's hilarious to me to see everyone else getting upset about it.
If you are seeing lots of replyguy spam make sure you aren’t casting a massive net and adding a bunch of public relays with no rate limiting to your relay list. Keep a smaller list of relays that you trust. If it’s a public relay, ask the operator what kinds of spam protections are enabled.
Think “know your farmer” aka “know your relay operator“.
I’ve seen so many accounts with like 30 public relays. You’re just asking to get spammed 😅
Maybe one day you can do this and clients spam protections will handle everything, but we’re not there yet.
View quoted note →
Could be too short a timeout, I have a new release coming soon that reworks some of this
Yah, 🤙💜
I’ve got my relay set to invite only. You can ask to be added, but I’ll check your feed first time make sure you’re one of us before you can post notes 😁👍
I just use primal and don't even understand the concept of joining a relay. how do I know what relays I have joined.


on primal you only read from a single relay, theirs. when you configure a relay its only for which relays you write to I believe.
on damus the relay list are both the relays you read from and write to.
some clients even go further and allow you to configure relays you write to and read from separately.
Does this mean that using a blastr relay is a bad idea right now?
It always was and always will be a bad idea
Interesting. I did not know it was always a bad idea. Tony used to praise it (the mutiny blastr)
Is it because it broadcasts your note to npubs you don‘t follow?
Its because its spammy and is a good way for your notes to be not written due to write rate limiting
same way email became a handful of large providers.
I did not know that. Thanks for the info!
💯🫡💜
Does this mean that this tool (nostrsync live) is no good either? Since it broadcasts all your notes to all major relays, when you do a backup with it?
https://nostrsync.live/
Yeah I doubt that would work, unless its using negentropy. Best way to sync your notes to the damus relay is the strfry sync command, which only copies things that are missing from either side.
Are there any good guides for finding the right relays?
Thanks again for the info!
Is that is why there is a major lag for notifications to hit? I've been experimenting keeping Primal, Ditto and Coracle open in browser. Even thought I've been posting via Primal, I typically get notifications back on it in Ditto 1st, Coracle 2nd and Primal a distant 3rd.
Yeah they are bottlenecked by a single server. Its why my account never worked on primal i suspect
Thanks for this info Will. I have been using primal a lot but will now spread the love more on Damus (the OG of iOS clients)
They are not reading from a single relay. They are reading from a single caching service (https://github.com/PrimalHQ/primal-caching-service) that connects to the relays.
This is a centralizing factor but the service is open source and could be self hosted. I don’t know of anyone doing it though.
nostr suxxxx
kekw
so in this case , in theory, it would be up to primal to fix the issue of the replyguy spam?
or would it just be up to users to change relays?
what's a good way to understand what relays are , like what would be a compassion to some existing thing or tech?
Is this "Tony" in the protocol with us, now?
From a single caching service.
ReplyGirl doesn't, unfortunately.
…When you realize you’re using a shit coin of a nostr client…
I have only just joined nostr. Still learning the ropes. Haven't joined any new relays just the default and reply guy is there. So he default spam on most clients. So until I know how all this works I can't get rid of him. So how would I know my relay operator so I could get rid of him?
Unrelated to you question:
Be careful. Primal asks for you personal information, but that's a terrible practice for anything nostr and bitcoin related. So don't put any of that into the app.
Better to try a different client.
Tony is no longer with us, on nostr. Legend has it he started a mutiny. Now, all we have to remember him by is his blastr


30? I am new here and my research watching You Tube Videos on Nostr suggest 3 to 5 relays... so I keep it lean!
This answers the question around those unsavoury posts I mentioned @Nathan Day
Primal is straight LARPing due to this. 🥲
Can’t believe even their native app forces you to only read from their relay.
Didn’t they need too much personal info to get a wallet too…right?
How to confirm this?
If this is the case that primal is only read from their relay/cache…that explains
A. Why notes and stuff aren’t congruent on Primal even if I have the same set of relays I do in Damus
B. Why they are experiencing these debilitating lags of data populating to the point the app is unusable
Transparently the only reason I went with Primal to start my #nostr life a week ago was
1. Easy wallet as I kept hitting road blocks with Alby and self custody
2. I liked it was same “app” mobile for mobile and web
3. I was testing clients
I do 95% of my #proofofwork here in #Damus and only (try to) pull up primal if I have to look up a hashtag or npub/user I can’t recall or get Damus to populate.
I love the idea YakiHonne is building but too many features with issues leading to poor UX
I removed all the relays I used that I identified the spam from, also added a couple WOT relays 💪
On Damus app only I still get one or two replyguys from a relay I have removed.
Thoughts on why a relay that is not longer in Damus (or any of my Nostr apps) would still be interacting with my notes in the form of a replyguy spam bot?
(In other words how do I resolve this?!)
#asknostr
Thank you for explaining that!
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I’m available for a 1-1 convo.
You can Get in touch with me now via simpleX chat with the link Below ⏬


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I’m available for a 1-1 convo.
You can Get in touch with me now via simpleX chat with the link Below ⏬


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I’m available for a 1-1 convo.
You can Get in touch with me now via simpleX chat with the link Below ⏬


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