Oddbean

Im ok with centralized banning of spammers on public relays. Hopefully this is the censorship we can all get behind. That and banning cp on media hosts. I’m ok with coordinated engineering efforts to censor specific things while keeping the network censorship resistant for legitimate activity. Bitcoin is censorship resistant but still “censors” certain types of spam at the p2p layer so everyone can actually use the system for its intended purpose. Bitcoin is even more extreme, these censorship rules (standardness rules) are centralized and decided by a few people. I’m not even suggesting that, i’m just suggesting a reputation based approach that relays can tap into or not. Spam does not deserve the same censorship resistance properties as legitimate activity. nostr:note1czywrqx87muljstlez0r4c8075ddsukxv0pmv6wvcrfq3lfqtrnqy2r2l2

So you would be willing to have your feed spammed all day with random messages just to have “ censorship resistance”? Censoring activity that is trying to disrupt the network activity is not censorship. You are not censoring a legitimate actor in the network. Should we allow 0 fee bitcoin transactions in every block, do you consider that censorship that we don’t allow it? People who think censoring spam is censorship in the reasonable definition of what people mean are wrong.

it depends on how you define spam and network disruption. if replyguy went around zapping everyone instead, would you call that disruptive? relays should implement the tools to minimize network disruption as they see fit. i love the point about fees, it’s a great tool to mitigate bad actors. if purple had a spam free relay, i’d use it! we’re all accustomed to paying for convenience. but it’s not my place to decide “who” or “what” gets a voice.

The notion of censorship resistence is whether the individual relay operator is providing a valuable service to the social network. If censorship of CP and spammers is a valuable service, those relays will succeed. If censoring political speech, or religious speech, or bigoted speech is a service deemed valuable to the network, that relay will succeed. To globally coordinate the activities of hundreds or thousands of relay operators to censor any one kind of speech is not realistic, even if there is a shared blacklist. The Outbox model makes a coordinated censorship campaign even less effective.

Cypherunk thinking. Practical, effective, correct. Truth is we've been banning the bad IPs for years. As Jimmy Wales said at the start of wikipedia, "people think wikipedia is a battle between good actors and bad actors -- it's not, its a battle between content writers, and vandals".

Thanks for posting this. I think it comes down to 'language' when people say Ban or Censor everyone's undies get in a bundle. It is no different than on Bitcoin. The term we need to use is Filter. Satoshi used Filters. In fact, Satoshi's first quest was to go after the similar thing you are talking about, SPAM on email. Cooks know when they are making a secret recipe, you don't just let a guy off the street into the kitchen to pee in your soup. It's not censorship, it's filtering. No value. One more example, Gmail is fantastic at censoring SPAM, however, with this election, I noticed they are letting in "DNC" or "Democratic" emails to come in but, I have the power to 'filter' and they are gone in a few clicks. 1) Do a search 2) Click the weird icon far right inside the search 3) Do this: https://m.primal.net/Ktnn.png

I think 'centralized' banning is a bit of a misnomer if relays are independently choosing to ban (spam or otherwise). Even if every single relay happens to be independently making the same choice to ban based on the same criteria, the choice to ban or not is still decentralized. *also, with regard to relays that are neither owned nor operated by the public, the term 'public relays' may be a bit misleading in the context of censorship.

Censorship resistance doesn't come from specific relay censorship or not, there is not need to all "accept" this rules, a relay owner can censorship and ban whatever he wants, it's his relay, censorship resistance comes from the protocol design and ease of running a relay. For a "normal" generic paid relay as a user I expect those use cases you mentioned to be cleared from the relay.

I'm not in favor of *ANY* type of centralized censorship. Even entertaining this idea means you've not learned anything from the recent past. I *AM* in favor of INDIVIDUALS being able to monitor their own feeds (in old school parlance "you can always change the channel if you don't like what's on the TV")--i.e. a "mute" list. But I couldn't disagree more with *ANY* type of centralized censorship--(And franky I can't believe I'm even reading this on Nostr). Sheeple...I don't need YOU or ANYONE to "protect" me or "keep me safe"...stop it!!

Also, would love you to run you own public relay without spam protections. When it starts dumping megabytes of spam into everyones threads and notifications people won’t want to use it, even with client based filtering, because its a waste of data and has additional mental burden of accidentally filtering people who are legitimate and outside your WoT.

If you want to solve the problem, then create tools that let INDIVIDUALS censor whatever they want...maybe they can subscribe to whitelists and blacklists... But it has to be at an INDIVIDUAL level--NOT a central level. Maybe it's easier to code it centrally--I get that--but just because it's easier doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

using a relay that blocks some kinds of events is an individual choice. Running your own relay that does not block anything is also an individual choice. It's all at the individual level, and the protocol guarantees you that.

Yes--agree. Yet practically speaking, if Nostr is going to prosper than most will not have the knowledge (nor desire) to run their own relays. Consequently these decisions (whether to censor, and how to do so) will ultimately determine the sucess (or failure) of the entire protocol. Given that Nostr was created in response to censorship on other platforms, then enabling censorship on Nostr seems to put us all on that same trajectory. We're better than that...FIND A WAY to solve the problem WITHOUT central control by some type of "authority". Let ME choose what I would like to read...

How will you know what a relay operator is "filtering"? How will you know if information you'd like to see is not being presented to you? How will you ensure a relay operator is not shadow banning certain accounts or topics? How will you know if a relay operator isn't doing exactly what Twitter and Facebook have been doing?

Said this in another reply, but are we really wanting Nostr's freedom of speech proposition to be "Hey spin up your own relay"? We're better than that--we need to make things easier for folks to adopt Nostr...not harder.

And I CERTAINLY will not...but your'e advocating for the exact thing that Nostr was created to prevent. Seriously, I cannot believe that you're saying "censorship is the answer"... That's what Twitter is for... Or... perhaps you're saying that if YOU are to be the ultimate arbiter of what should be censored, then it's ok... Check your ego at the door my friend...

So its censorship resistant than, whats your point? My suggestion doesn’t make nostr any less censorship resistant, it just provides a tool for cleaning up spam on relays, noone has to use the tool. Get a grip dude

Let me be clear--I see Nostr as the savior of online communication . We (as its stewards) need to be EXTREMELY careful to not destroy it as it grows and matures. Conceptually (IMHO) the answer is to create blacklists / whitelists that users subscribe to--those lists can be created by node operators or by external groups--and then the INDIVIDUAL chooses to enable those lists or not. We all do this already--most here do not look at the "global" feed--but I would NEVER say "let's just turn off global--no one reads it". But that is exactly what you're advocating for. Free and open communication is just that--and it's MY choice to decide what I will (and will not0 listen to. And it's NOT your choice to do that for me.

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