Following hashtags is not very hard. 

 I think he means topics like dedbird has where it detects the trending topics without a hashtag 

 We have working communities? 

 Yes and no I guess. I'm in a few and browse them with noStrudel. 

 This is very, very vulnerable to "black boxing" and abuse.

Without naming names, we already have one popular client changing a keyword the dev doesn't like into the poop emoji in every note without asking.

Using algorithms / LLMs to categorise without user approval will open far more opportunities for shenanigans.

Imagine every mention of Trump being tagged "rape" and "sh1tcoin" by a client algorithm, probably embedded in an LLM via tagged training data. 

 should name names if they’re doing that 

 Its been posted about quite a bit. Not a client I use. The offending keyword was "#monero". 

 Hashtag? 

 Nostur does this. It's the one I like and they only one I use on iOS, but I've called them out for being a bunch of fucking brats with incel dick breath with such retarded behavior. 

 As seen here
https://nostrcheck.me/media/82bdee506e769ebc94ee2f362d07c1960dce40bac650d826a42f8e0c019c3c96/14ffca5fd7418bd458d20c6700adcd5b0b6ec7d19a7d8fd53d0b875d4266ddeb.webp 

 So we have a fairly prominent client that portrays notes with inserted content as if signed by the original author's nsec.  Not great, but this is only the beginning.  There's nothing to stop clients from making much more material distortions.  Ultimately, the only solution may be to impose reputational costs on abusive clients.  Presumably, someday Nostr will have an app for that. 

 @Fabian what gives? 

 Shit! That’s the client I use too! Best one IMO for IOS. 

I don’t care about Monero per se, but what other words will go missing from my feed if a developer doesn’t like them? 

I guess if a client wanted to reduce spam it would block various words, but should be opt-in rather than default IMO. You opt-in and easily check the updated list of blocked words. And if the client goes too far, you dump it for another. 

But very dangerous to have it done behind the scenes without the users knowing. 
 

 Nostur doesn’t mute or change hashtags it just adds beautiful emojis when displaying them on the client side. 

 Why a turd emoji with monero? 😒 

 I see, so if I type #Monero, it’ll show up with an emoji, and I’ll know it’s a flagged word? 

And if eventually it’s done with words I care about it and distorts my experience I’ll know to leave?

That doesn’t sound as bad, TBH. 

 The dev is an idiot who thinks he has the right to alter what you post because his personal opinions and biases are more valuable than whatever you want to express. It's the behavior of a mental 8 year old. 

 Testing #monero  

 Not the same … 

 It might be helpful if clients prompted you to add hashtags or even also post notes to certain communities. That would probably also help out algorithms. 

 We tried this on snort. It’s definitely better than nothing but still easy to forget to tag. 

Tags could be silent too, but still require user participation- far from ideal. 

 You're not wrong. Topic-based relays have been a topic of conversation for quite some time, but we have yet to see them realized.  

 That's a cool idea 

 Nope. We don't have topics on nostr. 

 it's still just a hashtag.. 

 Yeah, seems accurate based on this from Ditto where it shows you an actual number value:

https://image.nostr.build/834ac9ef0a7dff9554d2d6caf11955f1994a90ccdb8b4aa2a94fb127d7259848.jpg 

 That’s what topics are essentially. 

 Setting topics per post manually is the problem. Even with best intentions people forget or spam 

 If the client UI makes it easy and clear to set a topic, those people who care about posting high signal content to their diverse audiences will definitely not forget - and those are only the people really worth following anyways. Don't care if someone abuses it to spam - I would simply unfollow them. 

 You’d have to more many people. This would get abused for sure. 

But yeah some clients could add tagging like snort used to have. 

 Mute 

 Not sure if I get your point. Why would I have to mute many people? You think they would setup a topic "Programming" on their profile, but then post politics all the time and tag it either as "all" or "programming" and then I would get to see their politics takes even though I only followed their programming topic? 

 Agreed. A problem I think nostr shares with other "social" platforms is that you can't follow someone without seeing everything they post. For some people, that's fine and awesome but sometimes I want to follow someone for their posts about certain topics (eg Minecraft, football) and not others (eg Politics, bitcoin).

I think there's room here for some form of client-side filtering rather than something at the relay level. A simple filter could be based on hashtags. Something more advanced might use a LLM to detect the topic which comes closer to solving both the "sender didn't set a topic" and "spam post isn't related to the stated topic" problems. 

 Smart clients, dumb relays