I like the idea of custom spam control

One of the key bets behind the design of Indra is the idea of being able to meter all traffic, relays don't forward any packet except one that contained a session key pair. This kills the marginal value of spam instantly and linearly according to data volume (not just number of messages even).

There just isn't such thing as free traffic with this design.

You could imagine a situation where you get paid, directly, to read/view advertisements. Advertisers would be a lot more careful about who they send marketing to if they had to pay for it.

Every system with freebies ends up a rats nest of free riders.

Nostr eliminates much of the attack vector from aggregators, or at least opens that up to be user controlled, but the spam problem is going to be big once enough users are on the network.

Hopefully we'll have you covered long before then.

The reason Hashcash didn't take off with email is it imposes a marginal cost on email servers that is higher than the marginal benefit of email. Servers would either need (a) to purchase hardware similar to Bitcoin mining rigs or (b) pay someone else to do the hashing for them. The spammers would pay for that same hashing hardware/service. The servers and spammers would continuously rise until either the servers give up.

Spammers make an enormous amount of money sending ransomware and phishing emails. Email server operators make little if any money from providing email hosting.

I recommend reading about how Simplex Chat handles spam. In order to contact someone, you share QR codes with each other. This raises the marginal cost to send spam messages to each person far higher, because it requires that a spammer get that QR code or hack the device of each user to get that data. And if a user starts spamming you, you just delete that user from your contact list.

Nostr developers could adopt Simplex Chat's approach and eliminate spam within a few months, but I don't think that any developer will, because that is antithetical to social media. Nostr could be so much more tha social media [1].

Proof of Work was initially proposed as an anti-spam mechanism for email. The idea is that to send an email you do a small amount of work, and the cost for this would be negligible for an average user, but for someone sending out tens of thousands of emails, it'd increase their costs. I would imagine this would be an easier solution than requiring users to setup a Lightning wallet, but I don't know what exactly the computational cost would be for sending a message. Ideally it wouldn't be too difficult for a mobile to compute without consuming battery

There's another paradigm for spam control on a decentralized protocol that's been operating for decades: email.

It has its flaws but there are groups that collect spam reports and publish a list of how spammy they think an email address / email sending IP is. And email inboxes subscribe to whatever lists they want to trust (and maybe publish their own!)

I could see that working for Nostr too. Some groups will monitor relays for "report" kind events and make judgemetn calls based on their algorithm of which pubkeys are spammy (or even just tag them as NSFW poster, or "posts only cute dog videos" or any other label that clients and users may want to utilize to filter their feeds.

I think that proof of work and making posts cost money can help a lot! But at the end of the day some spam will be worth the cost if it is able to be effective at scamming.

It may be more work to go with a model like this, but I think it'll preserve censorship resistance of nostr (because you can choose relays that listen to lists you agree with, or none at all); while also giving some measure of filtering power that isn't on every user to make a robust mute list.

Great idea. The status quo doesn’t work / way too cumbersome - you have to choose between turning off comments altogether, or going into a massive list of followers and individually selecting the ones you want to block. Your idea would allow people to set the going rate for their attention / energy.

If you are getting a lot of spam, raise the cost incrementally until the spam drops off but the posters and commenters still do their thing. You can adjust as needed to get the right amount of non-spam vs. spam.