Because the reply guy spams across the bridge into the fediverse a number of instances have muted or defederated the bridge.
It’s not even a very sophisticated spam attack and blocking or muting the bridge is a dumb solution.
Anyway I have mitigated this type of attack on wss://n.ok0.org - it was a bit challenging to do because I want to keep the flow of non spammy notes going, my write policy is reasonably fancy now.
To give you some idea of the scale, here’s the past 12 hours in the logs:
This is not even the only spam attack, there have been others going on for a while now, this one is just the most visible/annoys the most people because the spam is replies, so it generates notifications.
Mitigating this for my relay doesn’t really matter in the great scheme of things, people would have to exclusively only use my relay for this to benefit them, the spam will keep coming through on all other relays and not all of them will deal with it. Clients have the most impact in dealing with this shit.
The shitty bit is this only amplifies calls for walled off relay access (behind fees or whatever), which undermines the idea of Nostr.
I think they were taking the “Nothing of value was lost” position. They already weren’t thrilled with the content coming from nostr and this was the straw that broke the camels back.
Pretty sure this is nostr devs messing with nostr to try to find a way to squeeze money out of it btw.
There’s probably something to this, if you run a paid relay then it plays to your interests if free ones drown in spam. Devs have similar incentives.
Yeah, we might have to set it up where we only receive notes from paid relays to avoid this bot
For what it’s worth, my relay wss://n.ok0.org is free and deals with this bot through the write policy.
amethyst also added a word filter to names in the NeW update to deal with this
