How to i get rid of 699+ spam bot account follows? #asknostr
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account bot get 699+ #asknostr follows? spam How to of rid i
That's the great part. You cant.
There is no way to stop anyone from following you. The best you can do is post where they can't see your notes, which reduces your reach, or read from relays that they can't post to, hiding their replies from you.
Here's my canned response for how to minimize spam:
If you are seeing a lot of spam in your replies, it is because you are reading from relays that spammers can write to for free. Spam can only happen if two things are true: 1. It's free and easy to create new identities. 2. New identities can write notes to relays without a cost.
We're not able to, nor do we want to, make it difficult to create a new identity on Nostr, so reducing spam by making new users jump through hoops that can only be enforced by a centralized entity is not an option.
That means we need to prevent it via option 2, by restricting new identities from writing notes to relays without a cost. If you are reading from relays that don't impose some cost to write to them, either social, computational, or monetary, then you are bound to see spam on a regular basis.
Instead of reading from free and public relays, you should consider trading them out for the following types of relays:
- Web-of-Trust (WoT): This relay type imposes a social cost in order to write to it. Namely, you have to be followed by the relay owner or one of the npubs the relay owner follows before you can write notes to the relay. These types of relays may also automatically aggregate notes from those within the web-of-trust, even if they were written to other relays.
- Proof-of-Work (PoW): This relay type is less common, and it imposes a computational cost to write to it. Only those who have dedicated computational energy to generating the required PoW can write to the relay. This cost is trivial for the honest user, who only posts up to a couple times a minute, but imposes heavy costs on spammers, who are trying to post hundreds or thousands of times per minute. Unfortunately, most Nostr clients don't support adding PoW to notes, so most relays don't use it as a spam mitigation measure.
- Paid Relays: As the name implies, this relay type imposes a monetary cost to write to it. It may also impose a cost to read from it, but that is less common. Since this cost is per npub, and spammers don't ever use just one npub since that's too trivial to mute and move on, this makes paid relays affordable for honest users, but too expensive for spammers.
Since the only two relay types above that are currently in wide use are web-of-trust and paid relays, here are a few suggestions for each.
Web-of-Trust:
- wot.utxo.one
- nostrelites.org
- wot.nostr.net
Paid:
- nostr.wine
- nostr.land
- jellyfish.land
Yeah, but that's still not "getting rid of" or in any way preventing them from following you. It is still just hiding their follows from your view so you can get a more "accurate" number, which still isn't really accurate, since there could be quite legitimate follows whose kind 3s live on relays you aren't checking.
Indeed. I assumed OP was having issues with spam replies, or just the annoying bots that follow and unfollow on repeat, making it look like they are constantly getting new follows.
Guess they'll fall off since I'm never going to interact with them
If it's the ones I think it is, they just follow and unfollow repeatedly. Annoying but harmless.
I'll deal with it. Thanks for all the input.
You bet.
The issue is way worse over on X... I got 20 or so followers in the last couple days. Every single one of them is an impersonator...
In addition to the beautiful response above, depending on your client e.g amethyst, you can mute by the URL of the spam accounts if you notice a similar convention
I mean the image URL of the spam accounts
Indeed, very helpful for the current reply-bot spam. How effective that is will depend on you client. You might also find that muting a word on one client doesn't translate to other clients, too, depending on several factors.
I think the OP is just dealing with the npubs that just follow and unfollow people on repeat. Not much to do about those, and I honestly don't notice them, since the clients I generally use don't give me follower notifications.
If someone is complaining about it, I can almost guarantee they are using Primal.