>What will it do about spam?

It seems that would depend on, or change according to, each individual relay.

>If spam is a concern for a relay, it can require payment for publication or some other form of authentication, such as an email address or phone, and associate these internally with a pubkey that then gets to publish to that relay — or other anti-spam techniques, like hashcash or captchas. If a relay is being used as a spam vector, it can easily be unlisted by clients, which can continue to fetch updates from other relays.[0]

[0] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

It will most likely be overwhelmed by spam and scams, like telegram or like usenet itself (sadly). Until I got fed up and deleted telegram, I was randomly added to at least 1 investment scam promotion group every week.

Not necessary to delete it, just limit who can add you to the group

> The default settings allow for this, so you will want to change them. To do so, open the app and head to Settings -> Privacy and Security -> Groups & Channels and check off My Contacts instead of Everybody. You can also exclude specific contacts (or include specific users who aren't in your contacts).

https://www.iphonefaq.org/archives/977460

I was getting zero value from the app so it was a joy to delete it tbh. But that's good to hear.

They claim to defeat spam, but only mention payments as the way. I am not bullish about nostr

Proof of work is integrated in the protocol. Either relays or clients can require arbitrary difficulty to relay/show messages. You just drop messages that their hash doesn't start with the required amount of 0s

That sounds unpromising. Spammers will throw more computational resources than humans are willing to tolerate. They have captcha farms after all. Spammer bot with a server farm (maybe using stolen AWS credentials) will always outcompute a legit user with a mobile phone browser who is only willing to put up with a few seconds of latency.

It's using SHA256 hashing - so ASICs spammers will easily outcompete handhelds or even desktops. It'll need to upgrade to a more CPU friend hash like RandomX for this to have a chance of working.