How to avoid spooks?
I've been thinking lately about governments trying to subvert nostr or whatever censorship resistant network and I'm convinced that bots can be used to totally bend our perception of who's worth following and who's outright crazy. Bots can be used to give clout to some and take it from others.
And there is not really much one can do to fight this. If Alice has deep pockets to spawn an army of bots to follow and amplify her view and discredit Bob, others will follow that dynamic at least at some rate. If most of your follows are inclined to follow Alice rather than Bob, you can't get out of Alice' clout amplification.
We can curate who we follow and we can limit what we see to people we follow but unless we are hyper paranoid, we will end up following bots and spooks as clearly we want to at least see what our follows are interacting with.
LeoWandersleb / Leo Wandersleb
npub1gm…78rf6
2025-07-03 09:08:23 UTC
Author Public Key
npub1gm7tuvr9atc6u7q3gevjfeyfyvmrlul4y67k7u7hcxztz67ceexs078rf6Seen on
wss://nostr.winePublished at
2025-07-03 09:08:23 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "How to avoid spooks?\n\nI've been thinking lately about governments trying to subvert nostr or whatever censorship resistant network and I'm convinced that bots can be used to totally bend our perception of who's worth following and who's outright crazy. Bots can be used to give clout to some and take it from others.\n\nAnd there is not really much one can do to fight this. If Alice has deep pockets to spawn an army of bots to follow and amplify her view and discredit Bob, others will follow that dynamic at least at some rate. If most of your follows are inclined to follow Alice rather than Bob, you can't get out of Alice' clout amplification.\n\nWe can curate who we follow and we can limit what we see to people we follow but unless we are hyper paranoid, we will end up following bots and spooks as clearly we want to at least see what our follows are interacting with.",
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