Interesting conversation. As a new user and not a developer or bitcoin maximalist, the is tremendous friction to start here. Both technological and cultural.

I don’t think it’s a problem to automatically follow the devs for the same reasons that you outline here Walker. That said, if people think it’s a problem, it could just be a part of the onboarding wizard to get a list of pubkeys (could just be static) and select at least one pubkey to follow.

Yes, and twitter recommends some famous people to follow anyway.

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That’s how i started!

Why automatically follow tho? There is usually a recommended follow list when using a client anyway. I think devs are definitely with following btw.

This sort of ties in with the problem with the amethyst shadowbans. If people are automatically followed the amethyst shadowban system has the potential of becoming even worse than it already is imo. Obviously the problem here is Amethyst and #onyx is the solution, but how many new users will encounter onyx, it's p hidden away? Anyway, just an aside really. Not really a problem now, more a potential problem in future and if other clients decide to have shadowbans.

Riffing off your observation, #[2]​ , I imagine a client with a “more recognizable” onboarding process… Something that would make normies feel all warm and fuzzy…

For example, a series of screens (possibly optional/skippable, with the option to come back to them via an easily found button) that would ask questions about the user…

One screen might contain a number of “interest” check-boxes listing hobbies, career paths, movie preferences, religion, cultural and musical interests, etc. etc. On that screen, the user could simply tick-off the boxes that most interested them.

The client would then set them up with topical “follow” tags based on their interests, and perhaps hook them up with popular Nostriches sharing those interests.

Much as I love devs, the odds of a “normie” thrilling to remarks about GitHub and the toils and perils of javascript and rust are slim and none… :O

nostr:npub1cj8znuztfqkvq89pl8hceph0svvvqk0qay6nydgk9uyq7fhpfsgsqwrz4u I may not have made myself clear.

It's much easier than all this, it all boils down to not taking actions on behalf of users, recommend yes (of course), auto-follow never. (In my humble opinion). 🙂

This may be well intentioned but it is not an ideal solution.

In an ideal scenario, you’d ask users for their interest, and based on their selections recommend accounts that talk about those things.

One way we can solve partially for this is to recommend RSS feeds based on popular publications. If existing users interact with those feeds by quoting articles and or posting under them (probably less likely than quoting), then newbies can discover people who talk about those subjects.

I know it’s kind of a half-ass measure but it’s better than nothing. Another would be to recommend hashtags (though people don’t seem to use those as often — and I too, forget).

Autofollow is a not a good UX pattern. You are basically forcing the user to follow someone they may have no interest in following, developer or not. It doesn’t matter that they made the client, it’s up to the user to decide who to follow. By asking users for their interests in onboarding we can surface more relevant users and content 🙌