Oddbean

As long as irresponsible relay owners continue to push for censorship, running a non-censored relay is suicidal. The pro-censorship relays will inevitably attract the attention of regulators and State actors, because they are in fact not relays but publishers, and will be forced into submission and compliance, under threat of prosecution. Their irresponsible actions and obsession with replicating centralized social media practices "for the good of the protocol", "for adoption", "for common sense", etc., endangers everybody else and is the single worst point of failure of Nostr and what will effectively kill it, in time.

So you'll be responsible for whatever your clients, who give you money for your services, post? What will you do when the EU tells you that your paid "relay" is publishing anti-vaccine disinformation and that you have to ban and permanently block those accounts who do? And that you have to give assurances that you will no further allow them to do it? What if they decide that you're committing financial crimes because you could prevent them from zapping, and you don't? Will you KYC and report to the tax authorities your clients? Will you keep a centralized database of the transactions? What if some of them are zapping people in Russia or China, or in a tax haven?

I don't know how to solve this technically, other than with pure "dumb" relays, and that is only because I think you would have a chance at plausible deniability when they arrest you, at least. But even that may be insufficient, as we're seeing with the kangaroo courts that are being organized to jail people for writing software, as State bureaucracies become more and more brazen and drop all pretense to even act as a law-based regime.

@hh your points are insightful, but pretty entrenched in a deep dystopia. On the whole, our societies are not “there” yet. Whether we “will be” or not and “what to do if” are all fine questions… but these have little to do with “what we build today”. My point is: unknown number of causal paths may lead to dystopia. If we keep “narrowing down” what Nostr is for the sake of avoiding these possible futures, then Nostr will be nothing. Dumb relays have limited usefulness. And what’s to stop dystopian govt from coming after clients also? So clients have to be dumb? No “content filters” for anyone? This is just counter productive. If Nostr is gonna grow AT ALL to a scale where Govt cares, then so will bots and bad actors polluting the network with shit content. Without ability for relays AND clients to provide content filtering (and yes… based on “trusted” user feedback mechanisms like follow, mute, trust, report, ect…) then Nostr itself will fail. Content filtering is NOT some legacy practice of “centralized” walled garden socials. It is an essential tool for maintaining network health and vitality. Perfecting truly decentralized content filtering (where users choose, design, and share their own filters across clients) is Nostr’s game to loose. If we don’t develop these tools today, then tomorrow it may be too late. We need to EMBRACE the fact that nobody notices us yet, rather than LOCK DOWN and prepare for the worst.

Right. So we’re not “there” yet. Nostr “elites” are not being persecuted ATM. This is not a case of “once we have our persecuted then people will see that we are being persecuted”. We are NOT being persecuted ATM, and we should take advantage of this by “redefining” and “growing” the tools for decentralization. To cower for the sake of being persecuted is to forget the entire reason of existence. Why does Nostr exist? What can Nostr accomplish?

“Cowering” is to not pursue a “decentralized content filter” architecture (that would keep Nostr “trusted users” buffered from the onslaught of bots and bad actors that are sure to come) simply because the current paradigm of “content moderation” is centralized (run in black boxes by a handful of companies) and prone to being manipulated by govt. > “Perfecting truly decentralized content filtering (where users choose, design, and share their own filters across clients) is Nostr’s game to loose. If we don’t develop these tools today, then tomorrow it may be too late. We need to EMBRACE the fact that nobody notices us yet, rather than LOCK DOWN and prepare for the worst.”

Im using Damus, primarily. I do t know that. I would think that filtering should be done on the relay level. Having an assortment of PG, PG-13 and, R rated paid relays would provide a potential source of revenue for the relay operators as well as options for the users. People want different things so there’s a place for all of them.

do you really think they will treat you differently if you say "oh but I didn't have any policy to filter out spam"? I don't know what twisted mind you have there capable of such coherent speeches but devoid of any common sense