Yeah, the powers that br are happy to sacrifice all FOSS for the greater good of the slop machine:

https://www.osnews.com/story/141969/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/

Beyond infrastructure, AI slop is also becoming exhausting for maintainers and security folks:
https://hackaday.com/2026/01/26/the-curl-project-drops-bug-bounties-due-to-ai-slop/

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/185387

It has been increasingly fun to be an unpaid FOSS person out there 🤣. In a way, Nostr’s niche status and AI companies not coming so hard for data behind websockets (yet) help keep Nostr reasonably protected, aside from its own internal script kiddies, of course.

I think Utxo already wrote an alt relay for paid stuff somewhere (if not, there are certainly other commercial Khatru and non Khatru oferrings around). I rather keep paywalls away from Haven's main codebase, but now that we have whitelisting I'm sure you can vibecode something to do this. Just add a rest endpoint to Haven that adds an npub to the whitelist and refreshes the WoT (keep the endpoint private of course or it will get powmed), have your payment layer call this endpoint and you are done.

Good luck!

I don’t know how things are right now, but when I did this last year there were simply too many crawlers to even try to block manually. Plus, they don’t play fair. Lots of scrapers were spoofing IPs and using a multitude of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Even my firewall on a 128 GB memory server started to struggle to keep up. Anubis helped a bit, but things were still quite painful. I did this before Cloudflare enhanced its bot protection features. Assuming analytics can be trusted, China and the US alone were sending more traffic to my Forgejo instance, which only had a bunch of empty projects, than what I typically get on Nostr, ActivityPub, and IRC combined in a month.

Keeping my internal repo and syncing to public forges like GitHub, GitLab, and Codeberg is a good enough compromise for my needs while GRASP (and other non Nostr alternatives) matures. It also helps with the problem of nobody wanting to report issues or contribute outside of popular forges.

If you are keeping it public, make sure to either put it behind Cloudflare and enable bot protection or get something like Anubis going (I ended up bringing my instance behind my LAN + VPN and mirroring it to GitHub). Crawlers are thirsty for "organic" code at the moment.

Thanks for all your support, Logen. This version is going to be awesome for sure. Yep, the whitelisting, importing from other relays, and JSONL backup and restore combo opens a lot of possibilities, doesn’t it? I can imagine people using this to impor their notes from other relays, then exporting it in an organised set of JSONL files, giving that to their LLMs, or using something like jq to clean up awful stuff and reimporting it into a clean DB.

I’m currently stuck in Brazil dealing with a family bereavement and extended family who need to be put into care in the middle of the Carnaval holidays, which means there is nothing to do until Thursday. It does mean I’ve been having proper time to code for a change, which is good for Haven as it is getting some proper love.

I may as well implement blacklisting to make it easy to ban the occasional bad stuff that manages to make its way across the Web of Trust. I think this will finally make Haven more or less “feature complete” for what I expect from a personal relay.

I'm sure the macOS UI will follow up soon. Users have been asking for this one for quite a while :).

I hope to computer caches fire due to Haven + multi user hell threads 🤣. It should work for a dozen or so pubkeys though

@Gigi, @utxo the webmaster 🧑‍💻, @Nathan Day and last but nost least @florian (many thanks for your contribution mate)

There is some interesting crafted stuff out there, e.g. kind 3 follow lists with the same pubkey repeated multiple times. This was breaking Haven’s default WoT strategy and letting spammers in before I fixed it to only count a pubkey once per kind 3. There is also all sorts of crap in the list, totally broken events, etc., etc., etc.

I'm all in on IRC, RSS and static websites at this point. Let’s bring back AltaVista, CGI counters and guestbooks (all with heavy tar-pitting to survive the AI enshittification) and keep the human internet alive like it was in the 90s.

Looking great! Heads up: @Sergey B. has kindly contributed WoT Refresh (already merged to master) and I'm working on Improved Backup, and finally Restore functionality (from Backup, not external relays) so we'll have some new environment variables and functionality in the next release.