barrydeen/nspam-corpus

nspam — Nostr spam corpus (v2.2)

Labeled dataset for training an on-device spam classifier for Nostr kind:1 notes. Labels are at the pubkey level: a human reviewer judged each account holistically, and every note from that account inherits the author's label.

Released under MIT.

Contents

file	rows	schema
authors.jsonl	201 (123 real, 78 bot)	pubkey, label, labeled_at
notes.jsonl	16620 (11758 real, 4862 bot)	id, pubkey, label, content, tags, created_at

Labels are one of real (human user) or bot (automated spam / bot account). Accounts the labeler was unsure about were skipped and are not present in this release.

How labels were assigned

1. A live feed of kind:1 notes was streamed from public relays (damus.io, nos.lol, primal.net, nostr.wine, relay.nostr.band, snort.social).
2. A reviewer saw recent notes grouped by author and tagged each author as real / bot / skip.
3. All kind:1 notes by labeled authors were fetched and associated with the author's label.

This is subjective human judgement. Some accounts genuinely blend bot-like and real behavior and could reasonably be labeled either way.

How to load

from datasets import load_dataset

authors = load_dataset("barrydeen/nspam-corpus", "authors")
notes = load_dataset("barrydeen/nspam-corpus", "notes")

Or raw:

import json

with open("notes.jsonl") as f:
    notes = [json.loads(line) for line in f]

Intended use

• Training spam / abuse / bot classifiers for Nostr and similar open social networks.
• Research on text-based automated-account detection.
• Benchmarking on-device text classification.

Not for

• Targeting individual accounts for harassment, doxing, or retaliation.
• Making high-stakes moderation decisions without human review.
• Claims about specific accounts being definitively "bots" — these are judgment calls at a single point in time.

Ethical considerations

• Content is public. Nostr events are broadcast to open relays. This dataset distributes a curated snapshot; anyone could have collected it.
• Labels are not. The bot label is one reviewer's judgement and encodes a value assessment about a public identity. Mis-labeling is possible.
• Accounts evolve. A pubkey labeled bot in v2.2 may be compromised, handed off, or change behavior later. Labels are not permanent truth.
• Pubkeys are public identifiers. They appear in every note a user has posted. Including them here does not expose any new information.
• If you believe a specific pubkey is mis-labeled, please open an issue on the dataset repo.

Collection caveats

• Single labeler. No inter-annotator-agreement measurements.
• Relay biases: some relays index specific communities / regions more heavily.
• Point-in-time: notes reflect what relays returned at collection time; events may have been deleted or unreplicated since.

Citation

@misc{nspam,
  title = {nspam: Nostr spam corpus},
  version = {v2.2},
  year = {2026},
  license = {MIT},
}