Chris Trottier on Nostr: To clarify, a blocklist is different from a whitelist. A blocklist is who you don’t ...
To clarify, a blocklist is different from a whitelist.
A blocklist is who you don’t federate with.
In contrast, a whitelist is who you only federate with.
In certain circumstances, a whitelist might be preferable. For example, if you’re a server full of doctors and you only want to talk to other servers full of doctors, a whitelist makes that feasible.
But there’s a catch with servers that employ whitelists. The network effect will always be bottlenecked. Not only must you manually decide which servers are whitelisted, you must ensure that those servers abide by your terms for federation. And you must be content with the idea that your messages will only go so far. If that’s your intent, that’s fine.
However, scaling a whitelist that’s shared amongst multiple servers becomes very hard because, again, you have to validate what domains will be on the whitelist. If this whitelist requires consensus, then that will take a long time. And the more servers that are required for consensus, the longer time it will take.
That is, unless there’s one person who decides what’s on the whitelist and everyone trusts that one person. And speaking from experience, I don’t trust anyone who volunteers to validate such a whitelist.
A blocklist is who you don’t federate with.
In contrast, a whitelist is who you only federate with.
In certain circumstances, a whitelist might be preferable. For example, if you’re a server full of doctors and you only want to talk to other servers full of doctors, a whitelist makes that feasible.
But there’s a catch with servers that employ whitelists. The network effect will always be bottlenecked. Not only must you manually decide which servers are whitelisted, you must ensure that those servers abide by your terms for federation. And you must be content with the idea that your messages will only go so far. If that’s your intent, that’s fine.
However, scaling a whitelist that’s shared amongst multiple servers becomes very hard because, again, you have to validate what domains will be on the whitelist. If this whitelist requires consensus, then that will take a long time. And the more servers that are required for consensus, the longer time it will take.
That is, unless there’s one person who decides what’s on the whitelist and everyone trusts that one person. And speaking from experience, I don’t trust anyone who volunteers to validate such a whitelist.