Content can be a proxy for the trust, and in fact it usually is.
Discussion
How?
Walls and closed doors around reading/writing content somewhere are a way better proxy trust. #relays
Permission is one of the best proxies for trust.
Follows are permission-less.
If publicly following someone is a “vote” and has a bearing on my social graph, I have to evaluate the content that this someone consumes and act accordingly. Of course we can have differing opinions on some issues, and that is fine, but some opinions for some people cannot have any mediation because they are deemed personally unacceptable. In this case unfollow is inevitable.
As already mentioned, there are lists (including private ones) to stay updated on any topic in a neutral way, that is untethered from repercussions on the social graph.
Obviously these are new dynamics, nothing is “right” by definition, but the one mentioned seems to me a good breakdown.
At the UI/UX level it could simply be handled with two different actions, e.g., “Follow” and “Add to my read feed.”
You would not "follow" Taylor Swift but you would keep her on your reading list (named "garden snails").
A follow is used as your primary interest list. It has been since the start of Nostr. That is what the word follow is used for in most social media.
Try making a new list type for your special use case like “people I trust” instead.
> That is what the word follow is used for in most social media.
True. Since we had no other tool, which is instead offered by Nostr.
It's all about a new paradigm and offering users a clear way to embrace it.
> Try making a new list type for your special use case like “people I trust” instead.
In this way you defend the legacy position of the usual social networks, to what end? A social graph is not just a feed, it is used and will be used in other contexts, such as checking the reliability of an application (see zap.store).
Even the idea of a single follow list is dumb.
You might trust someone to verify software properly but not their opinions.
I would follow the government to see what shit they are doing and try to brace myself, not because i trust them. I follow news to see what they are talking about, not because i trust the media.
And hundreds of people followed me yesterday because i was cited in a list of brazilian people to follow on nostr (the author of the list might have me confused with someone else). I don't think they trust me (i wouldn't), they are just "trying" to see if the content i produce will be to their liking.
At the protocol level, it's a good idea, but needs to be complemented with something like "lists", that can be done client side. (or we need a NIP to enable us to store lists of npubs, unrelated with the following lists)
Did you read my previous note about "lists"?
We already have it: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/51.md