Oddbean

WoT WoT WoT, but how do you have WoT on a relay? The only way is to seed it with a specific user's profile, so it has to have an "authority" anyway. The only other way is to implement a Social Credit system for pubkeys, where pubkeys are only allowed to do certain things after they have passed the initial trials, over a period of time. Honestly this seems like a good solution to me, but I think people hate this idea? The problem is that people on Nostr want to have their cake and eat it too. They want absolute freedom to be totally anonymous, ephemeral identity, to see and be seen by everyone. Yet they simultaneously don't want to be spammed by anonymous random accounts. I believe this is the true internal conflict that ReplyGuy exposes. nostr:note19r3nx3qjx0h88028nwfchr36hpepd3z5wuskw40kpzxnkne7lzusv9l7f7

There are short term solutions while the devs work on a long term fix. On #ameytst for example, click on the spammers profile and see the relays they share with you. Remove them from the general relays tab and you are good. There is no point/advantage suffering with spam while waiting for a long term solution

For sure, I'm all for little temporary improvements and can personally handle the jank. Thing is that this adjustment as proposed by Vitor seemed dismissive of an actual solution, like as if that manual configuration is good enough UX, which is not. But thanks for the tip on how to actually do it!

nostr:nprofile1qqs8nsk2uy2w529fs8n4tx60u7z553e4yx5dy2nxhw4elgjgawpqlaspz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43q4hag5n who enforces the rules of those initial trials and how is consensus over those rules established?

There is no freedom without restrictions. But some restrictions are organic, they emerge spontaneously from the interaction between people (the "public" aspect of Nostr, including relays), other restrictions are thought out and established top down by an owner or owners (the "private" aspect of Nostr, including paid relays). Public and private are in a tense and complementary relationship, there is no one without the other, and this is also true for Nostr.

I don't hate that idea. The need to "prove" is spreading everywhere else, even with authority in place. The thought of that fading over time instead of becoming even more commonplace is refreshing. Unless tasks are too costly or ridiculously complicated, I don't see why new users would reject it.

Hey Alex. I have a NIP proposal called Zaps for comments. Idea is: clients and relays only accept a zap as a reply, if you opted in for that note. and you’re expected to refund the zaps back if they are legit. Do you think it can mitigate spam and people would use? https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/1483

Domain names are not issued by the government, but a certain government may be able to take over control of a domain. However, https://thepiratebay.org is still online and still facilitating bittorrent downloads of copyrighted material, even after all the persecution in the past. So, why not use more domain trust in addition (or as a fallback) to the WoT? For example, if I already follow more than 1 person on a certain domain, my client could automatically trust any other user with a valid NIP-05 address on that domain, at least until I have to block a pubkey associated with it. And it could even go and see which domains are trustworthy within my WoT. Non-Tor relays are already based on DNS anyway, and a lot of people also use NIP-05. So it's not like domain trust isn't part of Nostr at all right now.

genuinely curious — how do you define social credit system, who is going to define what os and what is not? How do you differentiate this from the social credit system that is in place in China and not eveolving into one? I am open to learn. 🤓

Filtering the visibility of spam on the app/clientside, or on relays by preventing the spam from being stored in the first place, using simple follow/social graphs is far better than an explicit reputation system that scores pubkeys on random parameters to gauge how “trustworthy” they may be. IPFS and others have historically tried to score peers to scale P2P networks; it devolves into an overly complicated mess of *arbitrary* rules. Reputation systems don’t scale just like how Mastodon style governance doesn’t scale: due to argument surface about what classifies trustworthiness/who’s allowed in the fishbowl. Relay operators integrating the social/follower graphs of people they trust to prevent the storage of spam will probably scale better than we think, especially if a lot of people begin to run their own small relay. Social graphs become more powerful as more users join. It’s a cumulative network effect, where the social side of the network effect accelerates the usefulness of the technological social graphs: https://youtu.be/a99ry70CnRs?si=2dRZMK1GjBwVB-cP We’re going to work on integrating this minimalist approach into the H.O.R.N.E.T Storage Nostr Relay @npub1h0rnetjp2qka44ayzyjcdh90gs3gzrtq4f94033heng6w34s0pzq2yfv0g with @npub1g53mukxnjkcmr94fhryzkqutdz2ukq4ks0gvy5af25rgmwsl4ngq43drvk new social graph package: https://github.com/mmalmi/nostr-social-graph Shortcuts are futile; slow is smooth and smooth is fast. 🐢 Solving spam or any other challenges on nostr by compromising on its original values is ultimately a fruitless pursuit.

We are talking about relays here. So I should just insert my own profile into my relay for WoT? That's what I've seen other "web of trust" relays do, but I don't think who I follow should determine who gets to post on my general-purpose, public relay.

The WoT relays of today calculate your WoT using follows, as you correctly point out. It’s very useful, but it’s imperfect for exactly the reasons you point out. The path forward will be to calculate WoT using a more diverse range of raw data. Follows, mutes, reports, zaps, reactions, etc etc. Which may sound too complicated to work. But this is how the grapevine works. In principle, ANY source of data can be converted into a format that allows it to be consumed by the grapevine algorithm. Different data sources can be combined in different ways to come up with different GrapeRank scores which can be used for a variety of purposes. One score will be used to decide who can post to your WoT relay. Another score will be used to determine who you trust to curate a list of trusted ecash mints. And so on.

Almost as if replyguy was written by someone very familiar with nostr development, wanting to force their opinion through terroristic means. who, subsequently, should very much hope they remain anonymous.

don't know, but they were demonstrating some Nostr relay privacy problems earlier this year by posting npub's leaked IP addresses. seems like spamming could be another method of forcing us to improve infrastructure.

"Nostr want to have their cake and eat it to"; it'd be as true as bore it is the "it is what it is" answer that often suggests mediocrity and ignites also an spirit of "I can change it!", which aside, could hardly be blamed, as for asking it to chill will be indeed as asking to chill creative spirit... Trust also encloses to the outside; maybe there could be hints in Hölderlin poems to face WOT's formalities https://image.nostr.build/a6e67680baa805585b91ef799add1e3907bf878137a980c8c60684fa201df648.png 😸

The problem is that people on Nostr want to have their cake and eat it too. They want absolute freedom to be totally anonymous, ephemeral identity, to see and be seen by everyone. Yet they simultaneously don't want to be spammed by anonymous random accounts. I believe this is the true internal conflict that ReplyGuy exposes. nostr:nevent1qqsz3cengsfr8mnnh4rehyut3catsuskc328wgt82hmq3rfmful03wgprfmhxue69uhkymmnw3ezumn0ddhhgctjduh8wmmjdvhsyg86np9a0kajstc8u9h846rmy6320wdepdeydfz8w8cv7kh9sqv02gpsgqqqqqqsysmg3s