A place for developers to talk about building on Farcaster.

/dev

How does Farcaster handle censorship and spam? I watched the YouTube overview, seems like every node is a full sync "archive node" (with 1yr expiry window). Muting happens clientside - What about abusive or illegal content? Can my Hub opt out of storing data from specific authors? Do spammers live rent free on my disk?

Full-stack digital product consultant @ BoundCorp.net

Not rent free. they have to pay 5$ per year I guess.

Training myself to become a public market investor .

Who do they pay $5/yr to? Surely it doesn't go to the other Hub operators. Is there a centralized entity collecting that?

It goes to the protocol contract. Hubs are configured to follow that contract for storage. If you modify your hub you’ll have invalid data for the CRDT and other Hubs will eventually stop peering with you.

Certainly ETH nodes can also be forced to host data that is unscrupulous, but they also charge gas for each byte making spam quite expensive - obviously not prohibitively so, because we still get spammed DICKCOIN airdrops every week. With FC, it's like I can pay $5 to a node and spam it without limit.

Then don’t run a Hub?

How does this work with Ethereum nodes?

But this means if someone is posting illegal content, I can't modify my Hub to exclude it. Client side filtering isn't sufficient when you already have so many custom clients in the ecosystem. The Hubs still bear the burden of spam storage here and every Hub has to republish it or else they are as you say invalid.