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 That sounds like censorship, not likely the current batch of clients would support that.  
 censorship-resistance doesn’t mean all of your notes should get seen by everyone at all times. you should be able to publish/share whatever you want and it should be visible to anyone who wants to see it (at the time they’d like to see it)

the tough part is clients need to try to infer when someone might want to see it

if someone follows me, presumably they want to see notes from me (they’re opting their attention into that). If I mute someone/something in a reply to my note that a consumer might otherwise see then a client is taking signal from me (via my mute action) that consumers who arrive at that note via my thread likely don’t want to see that note.

you should still be able to navigate to that muted note if you know that replier’s profile and want to browse notes they wrote. that’s how censorship-resistance works 
 Exactly this @dk. Censorship would be saying you can’t say something, can’t link to something, can’t publish something. Personal control is saying, I started this conversation, if you’re reading this because you’re following me, then you’re asking for my filtered and curated content, including replies. 

I could imagine a relay implementing functionality which would check to see if user A has muted user B, and then not serve up any of user B’s content which tags any user A posts. This again would only be censorship if all relays implemented this policy. As it is, each relay has full rights to decide what content it hosts and serves to clients. That’s why Nostr has multiple relays, and you can and should host your own relay. 

Imagine for example that I would make an AI powered bot that took pictures of you and then placed you in scenes of graphic and disturbing porn or violence, say your face and body in being raped or murdered. And they made that bot as a reply to everything you posted on Nostr. You can mute that bot, but then everybody else would see these posts except you. It would have a big negative impact on you. Or maybe it’s text, just some AI that makes up defamatory bullshit about you, but using everything you’ve posted as a basis, so to a new observer it looks like maybe, it’s real. You would want to be able to label that content and mute it. But you want other people to be able to use your label. 

The bot can post links to your content, it can build its own audience, but it shouldn’t be able attack you without recurse in YOUR threads. Let it post endless quote posts, and build its own audience. 

We only get a censorship resistant platform if it is also a place where people get to define their own rules for themselves. Want to see everything and ignore what the original poster has to say about their trolls, go for it. Use an app that ignores mutes. I have a lock on my front door. I invite most people come over and visit. But if you shit on my living room sofa, I’m going to ask you to leave. You can shit on your own sofa, or on the park bench, but I don’t want to have everybody else I invite in to my home to have to see your shit everywhere.  
 I know I’ve been a vocal advocate for algorithms…

and algorithms complicate these things a lot, but the same principles should apply 
 An obviously malicious bot like that would be reported and muted by your web of trust, via kind 1984. For something like self-curated feeds, NIP 72 may be suitable 
 @Hazey Except most clients aren’t using WOT for 1984 events either. My app does, so does Amethyst, but others just ignore 1984 events. And I regularly get called a censor for publishing 1984 events.  
 I use 1984 all the time because I hate spam. I would not use a client that can't use nostr's way of cleaning up your feed. Fixing it on the relays is not the solution to clients that are basically broken 
 I would not use a client that mutes certain replies because OP has them muted. You own your post, not the discourse that flows from it. The idea seems to stem from wanting to control other peoples' experience?
Of course people who would like to have their experience controlled can look for a client to do that for them. 
 the nice part is you can obviously use whatever client you’d like…

what if someone enters a thread cuz they follow you, but there are 1000 notes of discourse flowing through that thread? should they all be shown in-order? what if I’m following some of the repliers and viewing the discourse… might their replies be prioritized in my view? Should any other signals like zaps be used to prioritize which ones a consumer sees?

I just think our simple answers work well while nostr is subscale. But these questions of structural philosophy become more important over time. 
 Those are good considerations when designing an algorithm. Algorithms should not necessarily run purely on the client, as it could end up downloading a lot of notes that don't get seen. There has been discussion of algorithm-providing DVM's. 
 Yeah, I played with the DVMs on Amethyst and I think it’s a nice sneak peek at the future.

I just learned about this website recently which explores the ideas a bit:

https://noogle.lol/discover 
 Exactly, most Nostr apps are open source, and there will always be apps which ignore mutes and content labels. Even if all the app developers decided to honor the mutes on threads, it would be easy enough to make an app that didn’t. 

And if relays enforce these rules, then you just run your own relay with different rules.  
 It sounds like you are calling for censorship enforced by relays. And your answer to that censorship is "run your own relay." Why does that sound like recreating what we are trying get away from? 
 Well at this point we’re just talking about what clients are doing. But conceivably this could be applied to relays as well. 

I run a relay, relay.nos.social, and a few others, but that’s the main one. I publish both to my relay, and to a proxy that does a blaster to a bunch of public relays that accept writes. 

I could write some extensions for my relay which did this filtering based on mutes and reports, which I’d run on my relay. If you wanted the filters, use my relay. If you don’t like how I run my relay, use any one of the thousand relays.

@fiatjaf runs a relay which filters ‘censors’ content so you only get back content from people in the same physical country as you. If you make a request to the relay from Japan, then they’re censoring all non-japanese content. This is good because then you can publish and read content that’s legal in Japan, and you don’t need to care about other countries laws. 

Conceptually there’s no difference from the ‘censoring’ what will show up to each user based on geography vs what’s on a user’s mute list.  
 I do want to see localized nostr, but I don't know what is the right way to implement it. NFC check-in would be a way for local businesses to extend coupons, menus, or what-not to customers via nostr.
Speaking of which I don't think using peoples' IP is a legitimate way to determine location because 1. It's not voluntary, and 2. It's not always accurate like if they're on VPN. Maybe it could be communicated opt-in and natively via nostr 
 Yeah, you should totally build that using NFC’s or other ways to constrain location of what content is served to which clients.  
 It's just an experiment. 
 Yeah we need lots of experiments. By definition not all of them will work or be a good idea.  
 bad ideas can be fun.
like posting this note.