I think centralized moderation is the problem with social media servers. Users should be the ones to control their own moderation. See a post you don't like? Hide the post. Don't like any posts from a particular user? Block the user. It's not difficult to do and if users are really only following friends and famous accounts (celebrities, bots, news, etc.) they won't experience much spam anyway.

I think the real issue is discovery. How does one find other accounts that post about similar topics (other than friend-of-a-friend approach) and that aren't spam.

AFAICT at first glance, on nostr you would only see posts from accounts you follow. There isn't any "algorithm" to feed content to you. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but this is my impression. Therefore, it's all self-moderation, and you wouldn't have any spam or messages from hostile randos, because you wouldn't be following them in the first place. And as you say, "the real issue is discovery".

That's all that exists today. Nothing prevents a client from developing some sort of algorithm, querying the relays appropriately, and rendering notes from users not followed.

At the same time, nothing prevents a user from migrating to a different client that has no "algorithm".

You would think that at first glance, but it's short-sighted. Experiment: Turn off your email's spam filter for a month.

I can’t select whom emails me. I see everything that comes to me.

The same thing is not true for say, Twitter, where I only see posts from people I explicitly follow.

> I can't select whom emails me.

If you are in control of your mail server you can block email addresses, even entire domains or IP spaces. I do not understand this statement.

Email is push. Twitter is pull.

Of course you can set your email server to reject every single email that you do not have in a whitelist, but that’s not a feature of the protocol. Plus it’s something you need to manually do (because most people don’t want -or expect that- from email).

People expect Twitter (or similar apps/protocols) to not show them messages other than from people that are explicitly followed.

No they don't. Twitter hasn't done that (restrict your feed to only people you follow) in a long time.

There is a "Following" tab which is supposed to be just tweets from those you follow (and things they interact with), compared to the "For you" tab which is curated by "the algorithm". I'm pretty certain there has always been a way to filter the timeline down to just people you follow.

The point is that if you're doing that, you're also not having a spam problem.

edit: Opt-in, not opt-out. Whitelist, not blacklist.

Saw some CP, just block it, right? No one to be notified so it stops spreading.

That's how technology works. If it works for you, it works for your most bitter opponent. If it limits your opponents, it also limits your dearest friends.

Choosing the right amount of freedom is always a balancing act.

Damus currently has a report note button which broadcasts another event with a specific kind ID. Anyone could connect to relays and collect all the IDs of reported notes and do either good or bad things with this information. Other clients can add this button too, and can choose to not display previously reported notes (above a threshold etc).

In most jurisdictions you're supposed to report it to the police, so that they can identify who has accessed it and who attempts to access it next.

Discovery could be done via "retweet"/repost functionality. Perhaps there could be some feed of most reposted over the last day.

Just spit ballin

I don’t want to have to look at abuse material just to tell my machine to block a user. And play whack-a-mole as they reappear etc.

Moderation is vital for public social platforms.

These notes can already be flagged and reported. This action generates another note of a specific type. A nostr client could use this data and hide notes from users before they ever see them.

> These notes can already be flagged and reported. This action generates another note of a specific type. A nostr client could use this data and hide notes from users before they ever see them.

This is just crowdsourced moderation then? Which relies heavily on there not being bad actors that can be incentivised to run up botnets to generate bogus flags/reports to push their own agenda.

> The whole premise of Nostr is that you consider your access point hostile, yet its provider is still offering one.

I'm confused. Doesn't this apply to a lot of projects offering hosting for E2EE services? Why should it be a problem?

As I said in my post - if you read it - private communication and social media are not the same. The expectations are different. On a social media platform you want some level of persistence, you want someone to be able to nurture a healthy discussion culture.

But if all of your users were just fine, there are barely any advantages over a federated platform where you can migrate; much more disadvantages instead.

So far, there haven't been many "bad and toxic actors". I have met one bad actor among thousands on nostr and I muted him. I heard there was porn in global chat, but my client doesn't even offer global chat.

People don't consider their relays "hostile", but they don't trust them with things they don't need to trust them with. That's not the contradiction you imagine. Relay operators are trusted with things like spam filtering, illegal content removal, etc. One method is that a proof-of-work is required to start writing to a relay, and your public key can be banned quickly for bad behavior, resulting in another long proof-of-work to try again.

Trusting a relay with account management, for example, is horrible. Trust as little as necessary.

> So far, there haven't been many "bad and toxic actors"

It's also obscure enough to not even have a Wikipedia article, the "first & best iOS client for Nostr" wasn't published on GitHub until less than a year ago (but wasn't in the app store until this week according to another comment), the Android client they recommend wasn't on GitHub until last month, and the web client they recommend (Iris) didn't add Nostr support until 2 months ago. Edward Snowden seems to be the most prominent user, and he has 5 followers. I don't know if this is broken, because it seems a ridiculously low number, but that's what it displays.

There's lots of things that work well at small scale, but not so well at scale.

You can implement censorship at the relay level and then choose your censor.

> But this isn't an alternative to Mastodon or Twitter, it's an alternative to Berty, Cwtch, Speek, Briar, Anonymous Messenger, and maybe Matrix

And (not maybe) xx Network.

Nostr isn't an alternative to these messaging and chat apps because it has weak anonymity and privacy. Take a look at how those other apps/platforms work, and then compare them with Nostr.

> As such, it comes to no surprise that the free speech warriors from the crypto community are the main drivers of this protocol.

Nostr has weak privacy protections compared to most of of the above mentioned platforms, so I don't think it's something free speech advocates should feel comfortable promoting - anyone who truly needs free speech and uses Nostr won't last long.