Censorship, moderation, user filters and Nostr.

Censorship, moderation, user filters and Nostr.

Since this is a recurring discussion here, let’s clearly define terms to avoid the most frequent confusions.

Strictly understood censorship is government restriction on speech. It requires enforcement and thus force. If you can be arrested by the police for writing a tweet, that is clear censorship.

Moderation is restriction on speech enforced as policy on private property. It is mostly voluntary in the sense that if you enter a private space, you implicitly agree to abide by the rules set by its owner. However it is still top down. The most frequent penalty is expulsion.

User filters are decentralised, individual decisions on what content you want to see and what you want to block.

Nostr was built as a reaction to mass censorship on social media, sometimes enforced directly by governments and more often hidden behind heavy handed moderation by platforms that were in turn being threatened by governments.

Nostr’s decentralised architecture makes censorship very difficult, relay runners are many and there is no Nostr CEO to threaten with fines or arrest. However relays can still implement their moderation policies according to their preference. If a majority of relays agree, for example, to block a certain user, his messages would have a lot of trouble reaching his audience.

Many people have different ideas about what Nostr should become.

In my opinion Nostr’s most powerful purpose, how it can be a force for good would be for it to become a free speech platform that gives voice to those suffering censorship.

Centralised censorship would clearly contradict that goal. Heavy handed pervasive moderation would also pose a risk.

It is true that massive spam or morally abhorrent content would also detract from Nostr’s ability to become a true open, public and global forum for debate. Nobody wants to hold a debate in a depraved heap of trash. There is some content that nobody wants to even be in the same neighbourhood as. You also don’t want you important information about government lies and corruption to be drowned out in a sea of spam and shouting bots.

So how do you thread the needle? How do you find the balance?

I would argue that relays and clients should err on the side of caution with moderation and that they should empower users by giving them the tools to decide what to block.

Give users the tools: web of trust, zaps, spam filters, blocklists, whitelists, followlists, curated content packs, bot detection, parent filters, nsfw labelling, comment filtering options, thread ranking, etc.

There are many technical solutions. Let’s experiment with them. Let’s learn from the experience of other platforms. Let’s build.

But don’t let Nostr fall into the mistakes that made every other tech unusable as a free speech platform and useful only for propaganda, manipulation and advertising.

I can see the utility of a Nostr client that just does TikTok style short videos focused only on sports. No doubt it could go viral and attract millions of users.

But frankly that is not why I’m here. I’m hoping that neither are you.