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@ Justin Nakamoto-San ☑️
2023-07-29 19:41:00Interesting to see Nostr come up recently on the Bitmessage chan called 'bitmessage':
Usenet getting a rebirth in nostr. Usenet could also adopt bitcoin as a hashcash mechanism when the Big8 reconvenes. Spammers won't pay 1/10 of a penny to send 1000s of messages.
Well, stupid, anyway.
Usenet could have worked out but all the peer admins decided that allowing trolls to silence real users violates freedom of speech of the trolls. All normal people quickly abandoned the platform, leaving behind a bunch of mentally-deranged perverts, kind of like Bitmessage.
If you go the the Eternal September website they say they will give a copy of any abuse complaint to the stalker you are complaining about. That is like telling a woman who has been raped that you will give the rapist a copy of her complaint.
People in the tech world are stupid, venal, and evil.
Really? All the anonymous free ones I know of are dead. :(
Usenet is better. There are several anonymous, free news servers. The ultra-paranoid can use mixmaster or yamn to post, although that is overkill. Accessing Usenet over Tor is anonymous enough.
AH! One more thing, to all newcomers to Bitmessage channels:
If you're here for uncensored social interaction, and finding the place somewhat alien or underwhelming, perhaps have a look at the NOSTR ecosystem instead: it's maturing nicely and may be a better fit for your needs and expectations.
https://nostr-resources.com/
A few points for clarity: - a Bitmessage address is a pair of private keys. Private keys are really nothing more than large random numbers. - a Bitmessage address is primarily a way to RECEIVE messages, and only secondarily to AUTHENTICATE a sender The ability to create new keys at no cost is a by-design feature of the system, not a bug.
Secondly: the Bitmessage network will gladly and neutrally carry any payload for you as long as you pay the postage stamp, in the form of POW. It can not and will not open the envelope, look inside and make routing decisions on that basis. This is also by design.
You can contemplate making changes to the system to address some of the issues that you're sensitive about, but by losing or weakening the fundamental properties you'd end up with something fundamentally different, like SMTP or XMPP or COT or whatever. You see, when Bitmessage was created, the world already had SMTP and XMPP and COT, and some guy looked at all those WIDELY available options and said "This won't do", and wrote Bitmessage. And that's why we're here now, and not on Zoom or Discord or whatever NPCs are using these days, Telegram? Tictok?
That's not to say that Bitmessage is perfect as it is, there's still a lot to improve. But improvement must come along the lines of preserving and strengthening Bitmessage's fundamental properties rather than replicating the user experience that newcomers expect, from the consumer networks they've used before. Ask them why they left those networks for Bitmessage, the answer may be in there.
I hope this makes sense. Now send in the clowns.
There is another significant flaw with that currently: Creating a new address (if you don't do it within the BM client itself) has no associated cost, meaning even if you require separate addresses, it would be trivial to send each spam message from a new address.
And on the other self moderation: This would've needed much more powerful tools to be useful. As you said, there should be an option to also get rid of all messages an address posted, when you blacklist them. At the same time, it would've really helped if BM had proper threading support (and not just "append more text to a previous message"), and especially something to say "throw away this message and every future message that is a response to it, because it's most likely garbage".
I disagree. The only flaw is that people can post to a channel as the channel itself, which denies moderation - which is why a lot of people block messages coming from the channel itself. The moderation comes from the idea that you can blacklist/whitelist people, but the flaw is, it won't work on messages already posted - a simple change to the code to delete or hide messages coming from blacklisted addresses when they're blacklisted would be extremely helpful.
Well, "droves" is a big term for a platform that never had a really high number of users, so it's more like the few good users are trickling out. And I wouldn't call one delusional idiot spamming a DDoS, since that implies much much more traffic from many participants. It's more a mild annoyance.
Overall I'd call this a case study in how unmoderateable, anonymous chat cannot work, and that exposing channels in a "truly public" fashion is a grave design error, because they make people think it could work. The only thing BM can really work well for is direct E-Mail like communication between two known parties, or private channels for small groups.