I do have some interest in Soapbox on other fronts (e.g. having a common client for ActivityPub and Nostr). Please check your DMs.

Sorry if I hit a nerve by being overly honest here, Alex. I'll let you and "ReplyGuy" clash, and hopefully, at some point, developers will realise that Nostr and ActivityPub are not the same and shouldn't evolve in the same direction. Not everything that works on Mastodon will work for Nostr.

I'll say my last piece about spam and move on. "Registration" doesn't mean anything in Nostr. NIP-05 doesn't require buying domains or installing software. It's not costly. It can be done by uploading simple "nostr.json" files to countless free or dirt-cheap domains. This is what makes NIP-05 great as a way for users to self-identify, but it's not a reliable method for relays to track malicious users. Blocking domains only diminishes the usefulness of NIP-05.

Nostr needs to evolve past the "Look how smart my relay is" mentality to "look ma, no relays!" if it wants to survive real attacks from malicious actors. DNS is poison, not a cure.

Take a look at how protocols facing real attacks and censorship have evolved. Torrent, for example. Sure, there are private trackers with invites, registration forms, and increasingly centralised moderation. But, like it or not, DHT and PeX are what make torrents resilient. Interesting ideas like decentralised search have been implemented (e.g., Tribler). Honestly, the need for a tracker for bootstrapping is still Torrent’s Achilles' heel. Every once in a while, authorities bust a data centre in one of the remaining "privacy-friendly" countries, and a few trackers, including elite private trackers, are taken down for good. Meanwhile, DHT and PeX keep the network running in plain sight.

TL;DR: A gazillion "dumb" self-moderated, self-sufficient nodes in a P2P network are far more resilient than a bunch of "smart" centralised relays with increasingly strict requirements for their users. The best relay is the client itself.

You are all way smarter than me, with a lot of insider knowledge. I'm sure you've already realised all of this, so why does everyone seem to be focused on "fixing ReplyGuy" instead of, you know, fixing Nostr?