I wrote a rather lenghty to reply to some guy’s toot asking about if he should block mostr.pub. I thought it might be appreciated here.

Getting some reports about #mostr accounts that seem to just spew word soup, maybe to spam hashtags and links but after reading through a few profiles, I’m unsure what the deal there is. Am I right in assuming that nostr is by design more or less unmoderateable? Is that reason enough to block the bridge? #FediAdmin

NOSTR is a protocol just like ActivityPub is. Neither protocol in-and-of-itself is moderated but supports the ability to be moderated. ActivityPub does it via instances and sometimes is baked right into the platform. (I recall at one time Lemmy automatically blocked any posts that contained reactionary language unless the admin edited the source code and re-compiled it themselves). Similarly, NOSTR relays chose how to handle the reports much the same way AP servers set their own standards.

If I understand correctly, a report goes to whichever relays mostr.pub is connected to, and it’s up to each relay how to handle it. Some tag you as a whinny little bitch, others take that note out immediately, others ignore, and I think some actually have a dude look at its content and make decisions whether to remove the nevent (post) or actually block the npub (user).

Same as if you were using a NOSTR “account” yourself, except you don’t have control over which relays your account connects to as natives do, by specifically connecting, or specifically blocking in your client. Instead, I think, it is solely determined by which nostr users connect their client to wss://realy.mostr.pub and which other relays those same users are connected to. I believe a given nostr relay can choose to block any user that connects to a particular other relay.

I don’t expect @alexto be making any such blocks from the mostr relay. My understanding is that one of the reasons he’s shifted his focus for Soapbox from a Pleroma focused solution to a NOSTR one is one thing that always bothered him about the AP powered 'verse is some random dude can cut off communication between you and your friend unless at least one of the two of you administers your own instance or you create a new account on a different instance.

I’m uncertain if momostr.pink or the other nostr bridge, whose name I can’t remember currently, have similar lax policies that mostr.pub does or not. Regardless if you want direct control over anything more than blocking particular users, you are going to have to block any of these bridges.

In my personal experience I’ve been on NOSTR for over a year now, but Frienidca remains my primary social media. In that time I can say I’ve seen way more Bitcoin propaganda than even I am interested in, but certainly a lot less fascist, TERF, and racist nonsense than I have in some corners of the AP based 'verse. But bitcoin bois can get awful annoying. In general hosting a mastodon (or other platform) instance can be a dicey legal situation because you have little control on whether someone’s [potentially illegal] porn ends up being stored on your hardware . This doesn’t significantly change if you choose to connect your server to a nostr bridge or not.

BTW Soapbox, including mostr, doesn’t connect to lemmy. I don’t know if that was a purposeful design decision or just no one has bothered to make it work. There is at least one lemmy-like NOSTR client, Zapddit if it could connect to lemmy it might make me shift from Friendica to NOSTR as my primary social media.

#fediverse