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Comment by nacs | Hacker News Reader

The number of users is almost irrelevant in the context of Nostr because many clients generate a new ID. These aren't email-verified/phone-verified users -- this is literally just a new key/ID being generated.

Some web apps auto-create a new ID and join the network every time you use them.

Also, the signal to noise ratio is really bad with a lot of spam and almost all discussions related in some way to crypto.

Nostr has potential as a technology but the current demographic is basically a social network full of crypto fans.

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That was my experience as well, just constant crypto spam and all the other kinds of posts or tags are very inactive.

Additionally, I tried a few clients, they were a bit buggy and far from anything anyone would take seriously for more than a minute. Key portability was broken on them as well for some reason I don't even want to invest my time investigating.

These decentralised solutions need to distance themselves from cryptocurrency (or at least make it in the background rather than the center of discussion and operations) to be taken seriously.

I see Radicle[1] did that by distancing the version control software from the cryptocurrency, and I think it was a good decision.

[1] https://radicle.xyz/

It is always fascinating reading VC hit pieces like these to see just how many leaps of faith they must make and bags of salt they must eat to justify their investments the way they do. With the benefit of hindsight, Sequoia waxing lyrical about world's first trillioniare remains the best example among them all.

And even then most of the discussion are very shallow compared to crypto twitter. I can't understand why. I would've thought since it's early adopters, discussion inside a tightly knit group would be more meaningful... alas

Crypto scammers are the new discount viagra.

Nostr and services like it have a place but they are not going to replace services that have meaningful anti-spam.

Meaningful ant-spam is resource heavy operation. Maybe if AI models are portable/accessible enough to run on a small system - we'd reduce the amount of manual work required...

Talk to anyone who tried running their own private mailserver. SMTP is a decentralized open and very simple protocol - yet that doesn't address the issues that keep people away from hosting their own mailservers.

Anti-spam is one of those things that get very overblown when a lot of it can be quite easily solved. Simple bayesian spam filtering annihilates most spam. > Talk to anyone who tried running their own private mailserver I run a mailserver and spam is actually not a big issue for me at all. Blocking hosts with no rDNS, residential IPs and no dkim already blocks all the spammers who simply scan all the IP addresses and rspamd kills the rest. Granted, I don't post my email publicly on linkedin or other but I get no spam in my inbox.

Sorry, it's not. Modern spam filtering requires a lot of training data. Most spam that I would get - would easily bypass any small scale spam filtering operation.

My SpamAssasin 10 years ago would flag too many legitimate emails... while allowing genuine spam. The amount of crap I would get to my personal email was so bad, that I just switched to GMail for the simplicity.

It's just not worth the effort. Like it's just not worth the effort in investing into a decentralized social network at this point.

Maybe if the spam filtering protocols were public, trainable on all of the data(which isn't going to happen on a privacy focused network, ever), objectively efficient at catching spam... and runnable on even RaspberryPi 3 - you're just going to get spammed out of existence.

I guessing this is because you are used to an algorithm that is constantly showing you the most liked content. average day to day discussions between humans can be pretty shallow, nostr feels more like shooting the shit with your friends instead pumping rage bait and dopamine into you brain 24/7

This is also why I suspect people are generally nicer and happier on nostr, there is much less fighting because there is no algorithm that boosts angry and controversial threads.

not to say algorithms can't happen on nostr, there just aren't many in clients yet.

Correct user counts need to have a web-of-trust applied if you want an accurate count of "real followers", but I suspect that's the same on X as well.

As one of the largest accounts on nostr I can say there aren't many "crypto" fans on the network, those are all on farcaster. Lots of bitcoiners and freedom lovers though! Maybe try following #grownostr, there is lots of non-"crypto" content, mostly gardening, homesteading, etc.

You have to curate your feed to see the things you want by following specific people. There are no algorithms that automatically tailor the feed to your interests. If you go into the "global" or "universe" feed you will see lots of crap, but that is just noise that can be filtered out by setting your global feed to only show paid relays.

It is true anybody (or bot) can spin up new identites so the count of pubkeys doesn't say much.

It is also true that there is spam. But it is avoidable. Spam lives in the general feed and in replies. You can configure clients to ignore the general feed, only show posts of people you follow (and maybe of people they follow). If you want to meet new people, then use relays that filter spam. You have choices of how to solve this; nostr is about putting the decisions in your hands.

I have not seen any client that creates a new ID. I've always imported my key and used my same ID from day one.

But you are 100% that the community is heavily slanted towards bitcoin enthusiasts.

> If you want to meet new people, then use relays that filter spam.

And tada! You have centralization... Because filtering spam is a very complex operation.

I would recommend ponying up a few sats and using paid relays.

If you're just using free relays you will get inundated with spam.

I was running an open relay for awhile and closed it up because of this.

(Lightning is the magic lubricant that makes Nostr so promising).

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