Trying to understand nostr, I looked up its Wikipedia page...
> In 2024, in an article reporting on the project's funding, Business Insider claimed to have identified fiatjaf, and had found two websites previously published by this person to disseminate the work of Olavo de Carvalho, a far-right conspiracy theorist.
That... seems extremely irrelevant. If fiatjaf is contributing something useful and significant to the commons, why does it matter that he used to spread far-right conspiracy theories in the past?
> As a result of its ability to quickly and discreetly create accounts and publish posts to relays, Nostr can propagate spam much more easily if left unchecked. A notable example includes a case where multiple protocol bridges have been used to conduct spam waves on the Bluesky social network (itself connected to a competing protocol, the AT Protocol) by creating posts on Nostr, bridging the post to ActivityPub and bridging it again to Bluesky.
Surely they also had to create a Bluesky account for that? I don't see how Nostr is to blame here. Perhaps Bluesky forgot to use anti-spam measures when bridging things over from other sources? That's kind of on Bluesky, no?
This reads like a smear campaign against Nostr. I don't think I have the necessary Wikipedia karma to get it amended, but gee do I have opinions on this...
Of course, these days the people paid to do this have learned not to do edits from their own corporation or government office's announced IP blocks. But in times passed finding many of this category of edits was as simple as sorting edits on Wikipedia by the originating IP address and looking for which ones came from institutionally announced subnets.
Point being, massive amounts of capital and intelligence resources have been dedicated to censoring social media. There's nanny employees in every single social media company making sure "important" complainers are heard and their desires to silence voices fulfilled. I follow a large number of people on Nostr that have been banned from every other platform. Facebook. Twitter. Bluesky. "Free speech" sites like Gab and ActivityPub servers that advertise "free speech". But Nostr has the same entrance requirements and cryptographic sovereignty that Bitcoin provides. Generate a keypair and you can publish. People that want to find your content can simply subscribe to your public key. This results in a subversion of countless state and corporate capital expenditures. If people use Nostr, they will permanently lose the ability to moderate content in this oppressive manner. They absolutely do not want this to happen.
> Nostr can propagate spam much more easily if left unchecked.
Nowhere have I had a worse problem with spam than Twitter and Facebook. For all the alleged vulnerability of Nostr to spam, it has not currently materialized as an issue.
Note that filtering out actual spam without a centralized moderator is one of the most solved problems on the Internet. If you've ever installed Spamassassin or other well subscribed to Bayesian filters on an email server, you know that you never see spam ever again. In actuality, spam is a much bigger problem when you are dependent on fickle human moderation.
Some pages have 'semi-protection' or 'extended semi-protection', where a user must have a Wikipedia account which must have made a certain number of edits and be older than a specified time period.
However, this isn't one of them.
You can edit it immediately, either with or without creating an account.
As a 'left-leaning individual' it's funny because if you look up anti-war left leaning outlets and such on Wikipedia, they don't tend to have exactly glowing entries on there. Wikipedia and the other outlets described as 'left-leaning' are neoliberal institutions. Believe me that there's no love for these on the left.
When it's convenient for smears, neoliberals are left but then at other times it's the communists etc. In other words, 'left-leaning' is a grab bag of what one doesn't like these days, rather than any really meaningful group.
> Wikipedia and the other outlets described as 'left-leaning' are neoliberal institutions.
What exactly do you think 'neoliberal' means?
I do agree Wikipedia is not 'left-leaning', mainly because 'right' and 'left' are bullshit names that don't mean anything. But it doesn't even have the power to act in a situation that would make it neoliberal.
Neoliberal as in prominent decision makers/editors etc, such as Jimmy Wales express the sort of free market and foreign policy philosophy that has been mainstream since about the 80s.
It means that entries on individuals, countries etc. are broadly in line with what you'd read in any mainstream media outlet and so is its outlook on 'Western civilization'.
That doesn't mean it's not a good project, or that it has some great power, just that its 'gatekeepers' are not exactly dissidents of any sort.
Is biased in claiming the consensus is a contentious topic, instead of only a tiny well founded minority ever supporting it. But it's the same bias you will see in any history book.
If we go extreme in another direction, this one has the same bias of representing fringe views as equally represented in a debate:
There's a strong modernist bias, with a secondary classical liberal one. What is about exactly the same bias you would see on the main literature of both subjects.
So, no, except for behaving like an encyclopedia and reflecting the literature biases, I fail to see how the wiki is neoliberal as a whole.
The defining feature of fascism is these kind of tyrannical public-private partnerships. It was the entire basis of Mussolini's fascism. They are the literal fascists.
Redifining fascism as meaning "racism and anti-semitism" (certainly attitudes which by the current definition far predate fascism) has been one of the most clever acts of sleight of hand by the regime, giving it unlimited freedom to enact the most totalitarian form of fascism ever conceived.
> aren't these the people that would want the ability to disseminate information in the face of fascism?
Everybody wants free speech — but only for opinions they agree with. And they are against censorship — unless the "right people" are censored.
Recently, the left has been far more authoritarian, labeling everything they don't like as "far right hate speech", pushing to make dissent illegal, and demanding censorship. I guess the pendulum will swing the other way eventually.
It's not really a left VS right issue, but an authoritarian one. Free speech can be uncomfortable, that is the point. "Free speech, but…" does not work.
> Recently, the left has been far more authoritarian
I'm not sure how a reasonable comparison of authoritarian behavior seemingly assigns more weight to random Wikipedia contributors lumped together as "leftists" compared to the literal government currently controlled by the right that is routinely threatening to pull FCC licenses for critical speech among other intentionally speech chilling threats.
I'd say the pendulum has already swung the other way, while swinging much, much further and more openly than nebulous mob demands for "cancel culture", over zealous Twitter moderation of hate speech or whatever else the previous go-to examples for the left were. Before 2025 showed what a truly authoritarian anti-free speech policy looks like when wielded by those with actual legal power and zero shame.
> In 2024, in an article reporting on the project's funding, Business Insider claimed to have identified fiatjaf, and had found two websites previously published by this person to disseminate the work of Olavo de Carvalho, a far-right conspiracy theorist.
That... seems extremely irrelevant. If fiatjaf is contributing something useful and significant to the commons, why does it matter that he used to spread far-right conspiracy theories in the past?
> As a result of its ability to quickly and discreetly create accounts and publish posts to relays, Nostr can propagate spam much more easily if left unchecked. A notable example includes a case where multiple protocol bridges have been used to conduct spam waves on the Bluesky social network (itself connected to a competing protocol, the AT Protocol) by creating posts on Nostr, bridging the post to ActivityPub and bridging it again to Bluesky.
Surely they also had to create a Bluesky account for that? I don't see how Nostr is to blame here. Perhaps Bluesky forgot to use anti-spam measures when bridging things over from other sources? That's kind of on Bluesky, no?
This reads like a smear campaign against Nostr. I don't think I have the necessary Wikipedia karma to get it amended, but gee do I have opinions on this...