The comment spam for NY is kinda funny.  Because it's so cheerful and happy.  It could be much, much worse.  In the past, this kind of thing made me do a lot of thinking and projections into the future of nostr relays.  I realized, the only thing that solves comment spam is PoW (whether it's lightning, or nostr PoW).  Some relays try to use IP limiting and other tactics to block this, but it's not a sustainable practice and will end up blocking legitimate users more often than spam.  Eventually, a more sophisticated attack can only be slowed or stopped by increasing the cost for pubkeys.

I think there is still some value in free relays, especially at this stage of nostr.  That's why I run one.  I run it wide open, no IP blocks, no duplicate filters nothing, and the relay itself has no problem handling millions of Happy New Years messages.  Garbage in, Garbage out.  I am proud to be one of the only relays that accepted nostr:npub1sn0wdenkukak0d9dfczzeacvhkrgz92ak56egt7vdgzn8pv2wfqqhrjdv9 s first messages, BECAUSE I have no blocking in place.  Damus relay blocked him, and so did many top relays, his notes would have been lost in the blockage.  I am proud of this and it is a reminder to me that until clients can easily onboard someone like snowden to a PoW/paid relay I will continue to run nostr21.com this way for as long as I can.  Then I will switch it to PoW or paid mode.

Nostr is on a limited time window (unsure how long) until this type of comment spam becomes a problem.  During this time, a bot attack like this one is a good reminder that clients can build filtering based on relay sets.  Don't like comment spam?  Filter comments to just paid or PoW relays.  The other thing clients can do is make relays more visible, configurable, and adopt the new NIP for relay payments.  LFG!

Happy New Years everyone!  Enjoy #nostr