Oddbean

The only obstacle to Nostr's future development is spam. Not the review and removal of iOS and Google stores. The first spam war occurred in the spam attack on Nostr's global posts. It caused the earliest users to leave Nostr. Finally, nostr.band and nostr.wine's Relay provided clean Nostr global posts. The second spam war was spam replies to all posts. It interrupted Nostr's communication atmosphere. It interrupted Nostr's growth in 2024. Many users left temporarily. Perhaps paid certified NIP05 filtering would be a good solution. We already have many excellent NIP05 verification operators. Derek Ross 's nostrplebs.com , quentin 's nostrcheck.me , etc. Give the filtering rights to users, and use the client to choose which certifiers' user content to display. Build the first spam firewall. The earlier #Nostr discovers this problem, the less impact it will have on users. Fortunately, Nostr has very few users now. nostr:note1zg0gs04vtcvyv0r2jfednnhe4dzu00ns7amvysc3qrgapl8psuzqvewl34

I think paid verification is a good firewall and threshold. It is not easy to create a NIP05 spam account with paid verification. The payment may not require 50,000 sats, maybe only 500 sats or 50 sats. A new user can easily get the amount. And NIP05 filtering can be used in normal times. It is only used when facing large-scale spam attacks. In this way, our Nostr notification and reply list can maintain a good atmosphere of communication and exchange. Free verification has no value, and spam will still be rampant. Just like now we can not use NIP05 filtering. Because the spammers have stopped attacking Nostr, Nostr's clean communication atmosphere is back. https://image.nostr.build/f2ec99947b342dbb4df6e5891380c16390382b98a4c79b8ccd67b8b8c029a986.jpg

Majority of nostr doesn’t even know what sats are. That’s issue no. 1 with this approach. Requiring payment of any kind automatically makes it a private square not a public one. Whatever the best solution might be, it has to keep conversation free. Also, a tiny fee is a very low barrier to a determined spammer. The only reason paid verification works on Twitter is because the barrier to entry for verified payment is higher, and you get banned. On nostr, being banned means nothing.

The minute that relays start charging users, many people will just stop using that relay. And a dev will launch a new piece of software that will bring up a new relay on a smartphone, and it will get a million downloads. (Please...) What is keeping people from joining is the fact that all of their friends are still with them in the corporate algorithm advertising cage. We need to just keep talking about Nostr and making it a place that people want to be. The rest of it will be history.

Good! We’ve run a paid relay for 18 months. We’ve disseminated zero spam. If everyone paid for relays like https://relay.nostr.com.au then none of us would experience spam. Paid relays are the solution - not the problem. Free relays are the problem. Running a free relay with next to no spam mitigation should be considered an attack an Nostr. Doing so as a client dev who refuses to provide any tools to mitigate spam - you you’re just a bad actor at that point.

To be honest, the users I meet at Nostr now all know what sats are. The users who join Nostr have been patiently served by Bitcoin users. The reality is that Nostr’s current users do not have tens of millions of daily active users, but only tens of thousands of daily active users. If someone is willing, they can provide free NIP certification. Whether it is free or paid verification, operators can refuse spam certification. This can avoid malicious attacks. The problem here is not the high or low cost, but the need for an economic incentive mechanism to encourage NIP05 operators to operate for a long time. We can put a NIP05 filter button in the message notification bar. It can be used normally and left to the user to decide.

Spammer will just spin up their own nip5, while majority of users without a nostr address are cut out from conversation. This is a win for the spammer. The default nostr experience should not be “you have to register an address to get your word out”. This is excessive and unnecessary when a client can simply show you notes only within your network (also requires users to follow others, and not an idea solution on its own). I don’t know what the best solution looks like yet, but if we enable something like “join with friends” where you automatically follow some suggested (by your referrer) users, wot starts working for you. Nip5 filtering would work fine for something like Ditto.

If spammers create their own NIP05, it will be a good thing for spam filtering. Filtering spam will become easier. NIP05 is only an effective solution when facing a large-scale spam attack. But it is not the only way. But we need to provide users with a tool or button to solve spam now. WOT can only see the messages and conversations of the people you follow and the people you follow. This will only form a private space, and you cannot receive messages from new users.