we don’t want spam. relays should be able to act as they please. but devil’s advocate - censorship (in any form) is censorship. i haven’t picked a side yet.

Communism sucks, yet most family configurations are communist and that's probably good

The notion of censorship resistence is whether the individual relay operator is providing a valuable service to the social network. If censorship of CP and spammers is a valuable service, those relays will succeed. If censoring political speech, or religious speech, or bigoted speech is a service deemed valuable to the network, that relay will succeed. To globally coordinate the activities of hundreds or thousands of relay operators to censor any one kind of speech is not realistic, even if there is a shared blacklist. The Outbox model makes a coordinated censorship campaign even less effective.

Cypherunk thinking. Practical, effective, correct. Truth is we've been banning the bad IPs for years. As Jimmy Wales said at the start of wikipedia, "people think wikipedia is a battle between good actors and bad actors -- it's not, its a battle between content writers, and vandals".

So you would be willing to have your feed spammed all day with random messages just to have “ censorship resistance”? Censoring activity that is trying to disrupt the network activity is not censorship. You are not censoring a legitimate actor in the network. Should we allow 0 fee bitcoin transactions in every block, do you consider that censorship that we don’t allow it? People who think censoring spam is censorship in the reasonable definition of what people mean are wrong.

Thanks for posting this. I think it comes down to 'language' when people say Ban or Censor everyone's undies get in a bundle. It is no different than on Bitcoin. The term we need to use is Filter. Satoshi used Filters. In fact, Satoshi's first quest was to go after the similar thing you are talking about, SPAM on email. Cooks know when they are making a secret recipe, you don't just let a guy off the street into the kitchen to pee in your soup. It's not censorship, it's filtering. No value. One more example, Gmail is fantastic at censoring SPAM, however, with this election, I noticed they are letting in "DNC" or "Democratic" emails to come in but, I have the power to 'filter' and they are gone in a few clicks. 1) Do a search 2) Click the weird icon far right inside the search 3) Do this:

Exactly

Yeah: View quoted note →

I think 'centralized' banning is a bit of a misnomer if relays are independently choosing to ban (spam or otherwise). Even if every single relay happens to be independently making the same choice to ban based on the same criteria, the choice to ban or not is still decentralized. *also, with regard to relays that are neither owned nor operated by the public, the term 'public relays' may be a bit misleading in the context of censorship.

it depends on how you define spam and network disruption. if replyguy went around zapping everyone instead, would you call that disruptive? relays should implement the tools to minimize network disruption as they see fit. i love the point about fees, it’s a great tool to mitigate bad actors. if purple had a spam free relay, i’d use it! we’re all accustomed to paying for convenience. but it’s not my place to decide “who” or “what” gets a voice.

I'm not in favor of *ANY* type of centralized censorship. Even entertaining this idea means you've not learned anything from the recent past. I *AM* in favor of INDIVIDUALS being able to monitor their own feeds (in old school parlance "you can always change the channel if you don't like what's on the TV")--i.e. a "mute" list. But I couldn't disagree more with *ANY* type of centralized censorship--(And franky I can't believe I'm even reading this on Nostr). Sheeple...I don't need YOU or ANYONE to "protect" me or "keep me safe"...stop it!!

You don’t have to use my relay

Also, would love you to run you own public relay without spam protections. When it starts dumping megabytes of spam into everyones threads and notifications people won’t want to use it, even with client based filtering, because its a waste of data and has additional mental burden of accidentally filtering people who are legitimate and outside your WoT.

And I CERTAINLY will not...but your'e advocating for the exact thing that Nostr was created to prevent. Seriously, I cannot believe that you're saying "censorship is the answer"... That's what Twitter is for... Or... perhaps you're saying that if YOU are to be the ultimate arbiter of what should be censored, then it's ok... Check your ego at the door my friend...

No one is suggesting any type of censorship for the relay you choose to run. Relay anything you want, I’ll be enjoying getting notes from relays that filter out spam.

So its censorship resistant than, whats your point? My suggestion doesn’t make nostr any less censorship resistant, it just provides a tool for cleaning up spam on relays, noone has to use the tool. Get a grip dude

If you want to solve the problem, then create tools that let INDIVIDUALS censor whatever they want...maybe they can subscribe to whitelists and blacklists... But it has to be at an INDIVIDUAL level--NOT a central level. Maybe it's easier to code it centrally--I get that--but just because it's easier doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

What client do you use? Damus likely censors the least out of most of them. Who tf are you talking to?

Let me be clear--I see Nostr as the savior of online communication . We (as its stewards) need to be EXTREMELY careful to not destroy it as it grows and matures. Conceptually (IMHO) the answer is to create blacklists / whitelists that users subscribe to--those lists can be created by node operators or by external groups--and then the INDIVIDUAL chooses to enable those lists or not. We all do this already--most here do not look at the "global" feed--but I would NEVER say "let's just turn off global--no one reads it". But that is exactly what you're advocating for. Free and open communication is just that--and it's MY choice to decide what I will (and will not0 listen to. And it's NOT your choice to do that for me.

using a relay that blocks some kinds of events is an individual choice. Running your own relay that does not block anything is also an individual choice. It's all at the individual level, and the protocol guarantees you that.

Yes--agree. Yet practically speaking, if Nostr is going to prosper than most will not have the knowledge (nor desire) to run their own relays. Consequently these decisions (whether to censor, and how to do so) will ultimately determine the sucess (or failure) of the entire protocol. Given that Nostr was created in response to censorship on other platforms, then enabling censorship on Nostr seems to put us all on that same trajectory. We're better than that...FIND A WAY to solve the problem WITHOUT central control by some type of "authority". Let ME choose what I would like to read...

I'm not really sure what central authority you're talking about. There are, literally, hundreds (or even thousands) of relays. Which one is the central authority?

Each relay operator is the "central authority", deciding what is to be seen (and not seen) by that relay's users...

so you have thousands of independent central authorities to choose from….

How will you know what a relay operator is "filtering"? How will you know if information you'd like to see is not being presented to you? How will you ensure a relay operator is not shadow banning certain accounts or topics? How will you know if a relay operator isn't doing exactly what Twitter and Facebook have been doing?

there are several ways, but the simplest one is: run your fucking relay!

The problem is when these centralized efforts become so centralized that external forces can apply pressure to censor other things too.

Said this in another reply, but are we really wanting Nostr's freedom of speech proposition to be "Hey spin up your own relay"? We're better than that--we need to make things easier for folks to adopt Nostr...not harder.