Okay that makes sense. I didn't realize it encrypted the words, also.
Discussion
Yep. Again, it's a nice feature to have them encrypted, since you don't necessarily want to advertise what words you are muting to anyone who reads your mute list.
If you ask me, mute lists should be encrypted by default.
Yeah I'm a big fan of the encrypted mute list. It's like a personal shadow ban for irritants.
Indeed. There is one major downside to it, though.
One of my favorite clients is Coracle, and the reason is because it has built in WoT filtering. However, the scoring for this feature is based on how many people you follow who also have followed a particular npub (adds to that npub's score), vs the number of people you follow who have muted that npub (subtracts from their score). If your mute list is encrypted, Coracle cannot use it for this purpose.
A middle ground that might be workable would be to not encrypt mute lists, but relays won't display other users' mute lists to just anyone. Only those within the author's web-of-trust can access them, enforced by AUTH.
Just an idea, and probably too complicated to actually implement. 😂
That is a good idea. Best of both worlds. I feel like we're still so early that all the clients don't quite leverage the features that are available.