I think there will definately be some traction for labels/hashtags/chats etc in the future, there has to be. I think on nostr, we basically started with a bunch of refugees from moderated platforms, and so there were not very many willing to moderate as they'd just been kicked off the system and see any form of moderation = bad. However, nostr has been churning like crazy partly due to having zero moderation controls available to the average new user. I find, the relay customers that are the happiest, are the ones who understand that to have a good experience means moderation. Many malicious practices have been coming at nostr one by one, and they tend to target vulnerable nostr population. Client devs are aloof just because their experience is good, does not mean that a majority of new users will get reply-tagged out, with almost zero recourse. Running a relay, generally it takes someone who has at least started in nostr journey, but it does not take that much. Clients can embrace this power of the relays, instead of fighting it and basically acting like they don't matter. Many a nostr platform, is sucking up all this data from 'good' relays for free and pretending like they did something. They didn't, they're leaches. And when people start using them, they don't have any form of spam controls in place that work.

Haha, yeah, I still see the mod-bad sentiment reverberating, but I'm sort of glad it's still alive to offset the other angles. It shouldn't take 3+ clicks for users see any mention of a relay in their app, let alone assumed they know how to navigate them. Nostr is much more interesting than it's portrayed as in many situations, and not just to developers. If notes are moderated to new users' acceptance, relays are buried and unexplained, and keys are hidden behind auto-generated display names, the whole thing starts moving towards unintentional user lockin, simply because it's too hard to leave. On the main topic, I do think it's possible to collectively start building traction on moderation and curation soon, as clients shift & all these slick, super fun relays keep evolving. Team too-much-bitcoin-talk would definitely get the ball rolling if there wasn't a bunch of hurdles to overcome to do it. wss://relays.land/spatianostra a good example of what's possible without labels, even if it is a little too much "sunshine and rainbows" for regular browsing. I can imagine a similar setup, of people willing to label content collectively with a predetermined list of tags that the relay will accept... but again that gets stuck without the ability to label from within some widely used social client. The voting works because we can "like" from any client, then like-vote with intention later. (It's actually been fun psychological self-evaluation to participate in that) Would most people bother? Maybe not, but the ones that do would likely approach it with good intention. I'm struggling with how to keep that concept dynamic though. People who's content gets labeled, and who also label, get looped in? I don't know... you got my long thought for the day. Sorry. 😅

because it requires arbitrary work on the part of the user that doesn't really benefit them in any obvious way. an easier first step might be auto-tagging by and based on client.

I don't know. People timestamp & broadcast other people's notes. Labeling would be pretty on par with those actions, I think.