@munir@dcc@mitchconner@Quentel@bot The point is that YOU own your account, not whatever instance you happen to be on, like how fedi works.
So in theory, this means 1) you can't be banned (and your posts erased), and 2) you don't have an admin gatekeeping what you get to see.
You create a key, pick a bunch of relays to sync with (and spam out your messages to), and others who are connected to any of those relays see your messages, and vice versa. Very spammy protocol by design, but the duplication is intentional.
Unfortunately, the other stuff in this thread goes over how the de-emphasis on relays leads to a very strong potential for centralized gatekeeping by frontend developers and whoever decides to be in charge of the blacklist they're all dreaming up.
@munir@dcc@mitchconner@Quentel@bot Sure. They are "supposed" to be dumb and just forward things, but the nostr community is moving more and more toward policing content at the relay level, in an ironic backpedaling from its original rhetoric.
@munir@dcc@mitchconner@Quentel@bot Nostr is more individual-focused than "instance"-focused, but that ironically results in more centralization of things like pubkey blacklists.
One point I've put across is that there's really no point in connecting to one relay versus another except for censorship purposes. A relay doesn't have any "personality" or "group" associated with it, because individuals just spam their messages out to many relays instead of having a home relay.
@Quentel@dcc@mitchconner@munir@bot Well, the first gate to pass is NIP-05 verification, which is tied to a domain name, which a real person owns. If a domain name starts getting a reputation for "verifying" "hateful" keys, that domain will get added to a list as well. That scenario is almost exactly like fediblock.
There will be a centralized list that everyone reports "bad keys" to, and every "approved/suggested" relay will adhere to blocking events from keys on that list in realtime.
@dcc@mitchconner@Quentel@bot True, your instance owner does it for you. Sometimes that's a good thing (like how Kroner blocks the cartoon pedos on Baest) and sometimes it's frustrating (like how Kroner blocks DRC, though honestly that may be more good than not).
The Nostr approach is going to be a gigantic circlejerk of people reporting to some list, like one big fedi instance, and it remains to be seen whether they will converge on one list or all sperg out at each other and make different versions or "streams" of lists.
@Quentel@dcc@mitchconner@bot It'll be Fediblock but for individuals instead of instances. So once you're on the list, any relay that uses that list won't interact with you. In that sense it's the same.
But on the other hand, there are some relays that won't use that list, and the kind of people who like the list won't connect to relays that don't use the list, because they'll "be exposed to dangerous hate speech" or whatever. In that sense, it ends up being an individual's decision whether to "federate with" Scarlet Letter users by connecting (or not) to relays that don't use the list.
So it's an individual's choice.
BUT HERE'S THE CATCH!
Nearly every frontend pushes a list of "suggested" relays, and you can be certain that only relays using the list will be "suggested." So new individuals effectively don't get the choice, because they never even see the forbidden relays unless they find it through some other means (the same way Dark Fedi is found by people).
- Generate a keypair - Install a browser extension - Load keypair into extension - Visit frontend that uses the extension, which signs events on the frontend's behalf
@dcc@mitchconner@Quentel@bot I'm trying to make a new nostr npub and use a browser extension, and it's just layer after layer of "connect this thing to that, install this app, make an account there, link everything together"
@dcc@mitchconner@Quentel@bot I tried early on to get them to take a more federated mindset, but they were having none of it.
So here they are, with endless spam, chaos, missing messages and reacts, lost followers, etc.
But for what it is, even if not the best premise, it's still easy enough for one developer to implement, and there's a lot to be said about that.
If someone wants to get started with ActivityPub, they first have to learn "JSON-LD" which is a really horrible thing in itself, and it only gets worse from there.
I've developed a few very primitive nostr analysis tools in the past to find or filter keywords, maybe I'll do that again and see where the interesting users are.
Maybe there's a client that can remove every post that has the words "zap" or "bitcoin" which is probably around 90% of posts.
I'd probably also like to filter all image/video media, because it's never anything interesting. Just reposted midwit-tier memes.
The nostr community got a little retarded and started bloating up their specs, but the first one are very well-written and easy for a single developer to implement.