TrentonZero

https://trentonzero.github.io

Last Notes

2022-08-15 02:34:41 UTC

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Spam is one example. Email is the only protocol that works kinda sorta a little like nostr, in that everything is decentralized and anybody can send to anybody. nostr is a little worse actually because, I can send to unclebob, and he can block me. But if I cite an unclebob post with my spam for penis enlargement pills, over and over again, everybody who follows Bob has to block me. It isn't happening yet, because nostr isn't big enough. When it becomes even 1,000th the size of Twitter, it will be a huge problem. Relays and even the protocol author could make things better, but that brings me to the worse part...
Every social network was started by free speech absolutists. Nobody who started Facebook and Twitter wanted to be in the "police speech for the whole world" business. They were beaten into one small blow at a time. But the scariest example is Mastodon.
The Mastodon creator made a decentralized platform with fully open eyes to be self-policing and federated, because he wanted to give gay people the ability to create their own safe place where they could enforce their own community standards, and thought this was a good idea in general. Then Gab came along, said "Cool!" and used the protocol for a right-wing social network.
Mastodon's creator started a campaign to undermine his own protocol: it would've been sufficient to endorse blocking Gab nodes from the respectable parts of the fediverse. But he pushed client makers to blacklist Gab, and singled out those who didn't as crypto-Nazi.
From my perspective, from Facebook -> Twitter -> Mastodon, we keep solving for "censorship bad, no censorship" and not for "We need censorship, but more like how everyone just knows you don't say fuck at grandma's house, and less like how an LGBTQ Studies grad student can decide anonymously that nobody on Earth should be allowed to read Bablylon Bee's dangerous, hurtful, inappropriate jokes."
So my post is more from that perspective: build an actual real "community standards" tool that is so good that nobody could ever convince a majority of people that they need to be replaced with the actual thought police that keeping being brought into the other networks the instant "the bad guys" discover the network.
>From: (zerosequioso) at 08/14/22 20:13:57 on wss://relay.damus.io
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>Maybe I'm too naive, but given that communication is largely opt-in on nostr (person A doesn't see person B's posts unless they follow them, with few exceptions) I don't see much point to censorship. As long as users have the ability to block others it's very easy to create your own filter bubble. I could see relays wanting to defend themselves against spam or posting of illegal content though.

2022-08-14 23:01:19 UTC

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Yeah, it could work at the relay level, though that wasn't what I had in mind, and it has flaws.
Mainly, since relays are your gateway to the content, nothing makes them be transparent about precisely what they are filtering and why. That feels a little too much like a nanny. People should feel like they are being helped to do what they would do with blocking themselves, but don't want to bother.
So, I was thinking more like would be censors would simply provide something like an RSS feed that provides all the PKs they block, their reasons, and the PK of an admin who can be appealed to.
Then nostr clients can combine all the subscribed feeds into a single big blacklist locally for that user, and allow users to override bans they disagree with an explicit follow.
Done right, I would hope that this would evolve to most of the censoring feeds having lanes they stay in.
>From: (manfromhighcastle) at 08/14/22 09:26:59 on wss://relay.damus.io
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>Yes reminds me of Stephenson in I think The Fall, where people subscribe to their own reality feeds, and choose their own censors and what they voluntarily not want to see. We could have "normie" heavily censored mainstream relays, then lightly touched "yellow" relays and finally the full feed of the sewer on the "red" relays