Oddbean new post about login | logout How do #Nostr relays deal with obscene content? Thankfully, I haven't seen any, nor do I think Nostr necessarily lends itself to sharing illegal material quietly. But I expected to at least occasionally run into something horrific and haven't yet. Are we just early and mostly all good people? I've noticed that #Amethyst let's us apply warnings, but that appears to be completely under user control.
Relays see everything. You can't be "cancelled" but you can most certainly be deplatformed.
I'm wondering how they technically handle it. I doubt a human is manually combing through all of it. I've wondered if they apply existing filter technology or something. I've had a difficult time figuring out relays in general.
You better believe relay owners don't want bad actors distributing illegal content on their relays. In addition to filters etc, don't think for a second they don't manually dig in when necessary, because they do.
I'm comforted by that, but it also makes me less bullish on the idea of regular people running nodes, which in my opinion is the whole idea of decentralization. I have concerns about potentially storing or relaying child porn, for example. Maybe social media companies deserve a slight break in this regard. It's a big job to police such things and I've had a difficult time figuring out how to run a node even for myself without screwing up and accidentally ending up with bad stuff in my computer. That's the full context of my post. Maybe I'm over thinking it, but over is usually better than under.
There is a adult content on the relays but it is filtered by clients. If you search for the right hashtags you’ll find it in most clients. On slidestr I filter by content warning, hashtags and some „known npubs“ - that works surprisingly well. It needs some manual maintenance though.
It's the illegal non-adult stuff I'm mostly worried about. I want to run my own node, but I'm in the process of considering the possible legal implications of doing so. Lots to learn. Thanks!
I’ve definitely come across “obscene” content. If you browse a live stream of what random people are posting to relays, it’s there. Worse, most clients seem to download media by default. Since media is stored on third-party http servers, your browser has to make a DNS request for the server and open up a connection to fetch it. If that content is illegal in your location … well, hope your ISP doesn’t have enough info to turn you in. 🤷🏼♂️