- 2025
- Nov
- 24
Some last thoughts on Nostr.
I’ve been posting blog links to a federated social network called Nostr. This was mostly to drive traffic here, but I’d reply to anything that was sent to me that was not obvious spam. I’ve written about that in a couple of past posts:
Federated but disassociated: https://wereboar.com … etworking-via-nostr/
Some thoughts a few months later: https://wereboar.com … -after-a-few-months/
One of the reasons I chose the site I did was because it supported a feature of Nostr called “communities” - that’s exactly what it sounds like. A basic forum with a title and a common theme. I created /oldtech, a place for stuff like what I talk about here. While I never really got any other posts in the community, I did collect the usual spam.
Spam is a big problem on the Nostr network communities. There’s no good way to manage it, and the more popular you are the more you’ll get the standard Indian scams, crypto crap, and just general-purpose canned ham. You either approve it to show in the community, or you ignore it and it sits there in your inbox forever, waiting for you to approve it. In that regard, spam is very hard to control on Nostr, and it makes the communities messy.
Today I tried to make my usual Monday morning post and found that the site owner had removed communities in favor of a single feed of posts. The reason was that communities were “messy.” I fully understand this reasoning as there’s zero garbage control. Some of the communities I looked at had hundreds of pending spam messages in their box. (You can see pending messages, they just don’t show up in the regular feed.)
With that, my adventure with Nostr has come to and end, at least for now. I’ll check back in later in hopes it develops a little more, or perhaps I’ll find a new site that still has communities. Until then, you can find me here on wereboar, or on my mastodon feed.
Stay tuned for more hamfests, projects, and just plain junk!