I love Nostr and run my own personal relay, as it's much simpler to set up than a Bluesky or Mastodon instance.
The idea of nonexistent moderation is untrue. The big relays get big because they only commit to the minimum necessary moderation, though there are plenty of smaller or topic-centric relays based on user allowlists, payments (regularly or per note), or admins enforcing pretty standard moderation systems. The system caters just fine to woke people.
'No moderation' isn't always the same as 'Freedom of speech'. Whatever you're posting, there will always be at least one relay willing to take your notes (if not, run your own) which you can broadcast to your followers.
That's the thing. I can troll you across all your relays and others.
You can't really stop a targeted attacker. Sure you can always add a few "IF's" as disclaimer and nitpick all you want, reality is that moderation is defacto non-existent for the overwhelming majority of relays.
As a challenge, try to see for yourself what is posted to them without any filters or WoT algorithms, then you see the unfettered amount of material getting published. Of course that is small relays you can enable whitelisting and so forth, but those are corner cases. They are not the norm.
Fair enough, the only way I see feasible would be to use the Nostr protocol in a "walled garden"-type app/ecosystem, to the point where few users would know they're using Nostr (which would sacrifice most of the benefits of the protocol).
The global feed for me has always been generally as you say it is, with just as much unfettered content coming from Nostr-native pubkeys as from ones bridged from AT/AP/RSS etc. I thought that was just a consequence of me connecting to 30+ relays of varying sizes at all times, as nowadays I would suspect that the norm is to be subscribed to only a select few of the biggest relays.
I really do hope WoT gains traction, as for users it's a great middle ground between follows (easy filtering of feed, discoverability very difficult) and the global feed (easy discoverability, feed filtering very difficult).
Yes, it seems WoT is working fairly well since it is rare (ever?) to see spammers or trollers in recent times albeit is certain that they keep posting.
The downside is that newcomers have a really hard time to be noticed or followed, discoverability isn't yet at a good middle ground at the moment like you mention.
Let's hope a better algorithm can provide that balance. Every now and then it helps to view the global feed and push newcomers there to have feedback and follow them when the content is interesting.
The idea of nonexistent moderation is untrue. The big relays get big because they only commit to the minimum necessary moderation, though there are plenty of smaller or topic-centric relays based on user allowlists, payments (regularly or per note), or admins enforcing pretty standard moderation systems. The system caters just fine to woke people.
'No moderation' isn't always the same as 'Freedom of speech'. Whatever you're posting, there will always be at least one relay willing to take your notes (if not, run your own) which you can broadcast to your followers.