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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine you're running a relay on your machine, and somebody posts some CSAM, or stolen CC data, or hate speech, etc through your relay.

Relays can be authenticated. If you don't want your relay to accept data from anyone, don't leave it open. Same with any other Internet protocol.

Also, per the spec or convention, relays SHALL NOT talk to each other. Each relay is a separate island, but the protocol permits and recommends clients to publish on multiple relays. This is the basis of their censorship-resistance.

See also my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34530876

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The whole reason I was excited about Nostr was the censorship resistance but if the relays choose who gets to authenticate you’re back to square one (well, whichever square Mastodon is).

Also, it seems naive to think that a ban on blocklists in the spec will keep real free humans from doing exactly as they’ve done on email, Mastodon etc and share block lists.

I've only read a little about Nostr, but I think the difference is that with Nostr you own your own identity, so if a relay bans you you can just switch to a different relay and continue as you were with no significant disruption.

You're probably right about shared blacklists eventually becoming a thing though.

The AUTH Nostr Implementation Possibility is not mandatory. You can choose to use it or not, it's not all or nothing. Every single NIP except for NIP-01 is optional.

I wonder what the XMPP camp is up to these days

I sense there was probably some irony in your post. Nevertheless, I'll bite :)

The "XMPP camp" is doing well and very busy: https://xmpp.org/newsletter/

We're lacking a nostr bridge if anyone wants to work on that...

The spec doesn't say relays SHALL NOT talk to each other. YOU made that up. It says they don't talk to each other but it is not prevented.

You can mirror one relay to another easily:

echo '["REQ", "mirror" ,{}]' | websocat wss://source | jq -del '.[1]' | websocat wss://dest

> It says they don't talk to each other but it is not prevented

No protocol can prevent a piece of software from doing whatever they want.

The "shall not" is not absolute: the spec assumes and expects relays not to talk to each other. Nothing prevents you from creating a relay that connects to another relay, of course, but that would not be in the spirit of what Nostr is trying to achieve.

> Also, per the spec or convention, relays SHALL NOT talk to each other.

That has no bearing on an attacker.

> relays SHALL NOT talk to each other

I don't get it. What's the point then?

At that point it is an endpoint not a relay.

Yeah relay is a bad name for it.

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