a better solution imo is to show follower counts that make sense, like on npub.world
nostr:nprofile1qqsyvrp9u6p0mfur9dfdru3d853tx9mdjuhkphxuxgfwmryja7zsvhqpzamhxue69uhhv6t5daezumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tcpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcscpyug how much of a #Zapraiser do we need for you to remove follower counts from Amethyst? 1M?
Discussion
That’s sort of admitting that nostr is an internet that *needs* a Google. Which is cool, nothing wrong with crawling and indexing per se, but that’s quite a thing for a decentralized protocol to collectively admit.
I don't think that's the case. Nostr can work perfectly fine without "global" counts. But if you want to offer them, then they should make sense
I don’t buy this logic, tempting as it is. Global counts, once available and reliable, sooner or later become indispensable, and from that point onwards saying “it can still work without them” becomes lip service to pure protocol ideology. Happens every time.
Except that global-anything is useless and expensive.
Good search = Good computation = Looking within a likely scope + having a sensible road to follow for deeper digging
Communities (especially when being npubs) are the most underestimated building block for a high signal road to follow.
Question is should Primal, Damus, etc. show follower counts?
No.
They should stop copying Twitter all together.
Their entire UX is built around a global state.
Their "algos" etc, just like Twitters, are only lenses to see the exact same global state through.
A global state that most actually desire, because everyone seeing a different counts, replies, top trends, etc... is frustrating UX.
So either you keep reminding everyone every day that this frustrating UX is actually the "total awesome next internet" or you start trying to become "the global state".
The prevalent Twitter-clones do both.
Their way out is to stop being Twitter and start making room in their imagination for what the Nostr primitives uniquely enable.
For me, that's building interoperable online castles 🏰 that each have their own global state.
>A global state that most actually desire, because everyone seeing a different counts, replies, top trends, etc... is frustrating UX.
This 100% agree. If you make the uncertainty part of the pitch then that's cool, who knows, maybe chaos sells. If you try to hide the uncertainty with pretend absolutes then the UX doesn't just become frustrating, it becomes comedic.
I don't get npub.world Almost every time I search for someone I know is legit (like myself), I get nothing. Literally, some random RSS feed shows near top result for my name. Am I missing something?
Did you find this via search or just append my npub? My understanding was that npub.world is a social graph curated search service. By that metric, it appears broken for me and countless unlucky others who have common names.
My name is Ryan, I have the same same problem 😂 That's why search by npub works too. It's your unique identifier.
If I know the npub, then what's the point of search? To me, search implies I don't already know the npub, but I might have a guess at the name.
Using a common name isn't going to work very well on any search. You can also set up a nip05, then you have a unique identifier that is easier to parse. Having a single, common first name as your identifier is an issue, that's why there are alternatives 🤷♂️
Meta/FB has pretty decent global search based on names only. Yes, it might take a minute of scrolling and profile pic scanning to find my guy, but it works. Yes, I'm aware that comparing NOSTR and Meta is apples/oranges. I'm using them to illustrate how a good, quasi global search UX should handle these cases.
If you had an account named just "Chris" on Facebook it would be basically impossible to find, drowned out amongst tens of thousands of other users, if not hundreds of thousands. I've used that search, it's not that great. My first and last name combination has hundreds of matches, let alone finding an extremely common first name only 🤷♂️
Nip 05 solves this. There are free and paid services, plus it can be set up on your own domain.