Nostr Web Client

Kind 3 was probably a mistake, following could have been local or private by default, and assigning public "trust" to people could have been taken a more intentional form, with more structure to it rather than "whoever I want to see posts from I put in this list and now that person gets an endorsement from me".

But following people is still a good thing.

I do think the focus on following people should be drastically reduced (no one can really "follow" more than 100 people) and that we need more opinionated relays like wss://theforest.nostr1.com/ and more tools for browsing relays, recommending relays, publishing to specific relays.

It shouldn't be necessary for a new user to click on a follow button hundreds of times in order to get a feed. Clients shouldn't be required to send many hundreds of REQs (most of which will be about pubkeys that haven't posted anything for months) to a bunch of relays in order to build a default feed. That number can be cut drastically and Nostr can still work fine, in fact much better.

Brunswick 5mo ago

The current follow problem that I have can be solved client-side; where one can see whether the follow is reciprocal (why doesent Amethyst have this?) and how long since that person has been "active." (e.g. likes, zaps, profile updates, posts, replies, etc.) Then it should be trivial to unfollow dead accounts and the follow-list is more meaningful.

The public aspect of follows has a wot side-effect, which is also a primary feature. When I'm searching for a profile, I look to see if anyone I "trust" is also following that profile. When people demonstrate they are either worthless or spammy, they tend to get pruned from most lists. The WoT score based on follow, activity & reciprocity has more power than it regarded to.

What a follow-based WoT means in the context of social media is whether the followed identity is likely to be authentic and of information-value, not necessarily whether you agree with that identity. (I follow nostr:nprofile1qqsx3tq0ylq9g5mha3h8ch8x4gkka792rmddc65v9law3mdq0un2llqpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43qcev0zp for god's sake)

This stuff about "not needing to press follow a hundred times" and "updating their follow list on the relay every time the button is pressed) has no traction in my mind. One can modify a client to batch follows, like in nostr:nprofile1qqsrjerj9rhamu30sjnuudk3zxeh3njl852mssqng7z4up9jfj8yupqpypmhxue69uhkx6r0wf6hxtndd94k2erfd3nk2u3wvdhk6w35xs6z7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcpz4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezummcw3ezuer9wchsfrt6ps. What you are describing is personal feed curation, and many intend this to be public. Some people may want a public follow list, and several separate private follow lists (to avoid endorsement), but this is a power-user feature, and probably too complicated for the "average" person.

To separate the WoT feature from the follow feature is an interesting idea, but also likely to never be useful due to lack of use. Normally people have no idea whether a person they are following is a real person, or even an honest person. In that regard, a "trust" button would never EVER be used. The purpose of a follow-backed WoT is not to endorse, it's so others can see what you want to see, regardless if you "endorse" them or not.

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Discussion

fiatjaf 5mo ago

> In that regard, a "trust" button would never EVER be used.

Yes, I don't think there should be a "trust" button. "Trust" is too vague, too generic, not a good word. I would never click that one either.

But perhaps you have a list of uber drivers you like, or a list of wiki authors you favor over others, a list of people with music tastes you endorse etc. I don't know.

fiatjaf 5mo ago

> The public aspect of follows has a wot side-effect, which is also a primary feature.

I agree, but it's also too limited. Other possibilities exist and they're not being explored. Mainly in my mind right now is the idea that by following some relays you're open to see posts from people you don't know, and that you trust that relay enough to accept their judgement about who is a person that is worth listening to, and they can have clearer criteria more uniformly enforced, like "whoever pays", "whoever gets manually approved by such and such", "whoever has produced these many hashes", "whoever has a PhD", I don't know (of course since follow lists can still exist this can also be based on the current WoT criteria).

Brunswick 5mo ago

Agreed. The ability to follow a curated relay output could be very powerful, but how is that different to the end-user than subscribing to a curated list published by individuals? One could pay to be on that list, in addition to being curated/endorsed, without needing the list owner to run a relay.

Laeserin 5mo ago

We already have that. Those are the recommendation lists, like the one Primal users are fed during onboarding. Or the follow packs, or shared lists on Listr.lol

The main difference is that a document (list) has no utility to anyone, other than controlling access. A relay is a holistic community of related services, that has limited/predefined criteria for access.

That sounds like a minor difference, but in practice, they're two completely different things.

a list ≠ a server

All relays have lists, no lists have relays.

Brunswick 5mo ago

I understand, but I still fail to see the vision of subscribing to a relay when you could instead subscribe/unsubscribe to a curated list (like a privately controlled hashtag, but for people instead of individual posts).

Laeserin 5mo ago

WoT is about endorsement. That's why it has "trust" in the name.

Knowing who some npub follows doesn't necessarily tell me anything at all, about what they're actually looking at. I used to have over 1k follows, and I just looked at my relay feeds and some lists. You would need the relay traffic to know, and you can't necessarily monitor all of their relays.

I was happy to follow everyone back because it didn't mean anything.

> The current follow problem that I have can be solved client-side; where one can see whether the follow is reciprocal (why doesent Amethyst have this?) and how long since that person has been "active." (e.g. likes, zaps, profile updates, posts, replies, etc.) Then it should be trivial to unfollow dead accounts and the follow-list is more meaningful.

We actually have mini-clients that do this. I've used them, repeatedly, but it quickly leads to a dull, low-signal feed because the people who are the most-interesting to read are also often the ones that post less-frequently or more often on private or protected/AUTH relays, and they are much much less-likely to "follow back".

I'm well aware that my nostr:npub1l5sga6xg72phsz5422ykujprejwud075ggrr3z2hwyrfgr7eylqstegx9z account has a rock-bottom WoT, because it has no follows, and my nostr:npub1m4ny6hjqzepn4rxknuq94c2gpqzr29ufkkw7ttcxyak7v43n6vvsajc2jl has a lowish one, as I don't follow that many npubs, but I leave it like that, on purpose. In protest. I think follows are commie, designed to reduce our freedom, create rampant shadow-banning, force us to make all of our contacts public and easily searchable, and steer us all to be drooling influencer groupies.

Everything I've seen happen, on Nostr, since I got here, just solidifies that opinion for me. There has not been any counter-evidence. The whole situation has just steadily degraded.

Most people disagree with me, and cannot imagine how Nostr could work well without Kind 03, but I am not Most People and never have been.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 5mo ago

my second degree of follows auto-whitelist design makes it possible for outbox model and personal relays to actually work. the "owners" of a relay have follow lists, and all the npubs on that follow list are spidered to find their follow lists, and from that the relay generates a whitelist automatically that changes whenever users update their lists.

it's a repurposing of kind 3 that i think makes sense - it makes a complete list of all the people who i might want to read or message.

with this list created, my personal relay functions effectively as inbox/outbox and so long as the people in the first and second degree of the owners follow graph use auth, they can post to the relay.

one of the things i have discovered, though, is the great majority of people are using clients that pick up these relay lists and then spam the heck out of the relay trying to publish events to it... but they don't bother authing. oh so sad. doesn't really use that much bandwidth, so idc. but the people who use good clients that do auth, and are in my second degree graph, are found on my relay. and there's quite a few of my follows that do.

the fly in the ointment is just the attitude of most funded client devs not giving a damn about implementing auth properly. but, seriously, fuck them. you can easy enough let your frens know "hey, i don't see your events on my relay, what client are you using? because it's ghey, i recommend x, y and z" and if the other person cares, they try that and voila. connectivity, without centralization.

Brunswick 5mo ago

> I'm well aware that my nostr:nprofile1qqs06gywary09qmcp2249ztwfq3ue8wxhl2yyp3c39thzp55plvj0sgpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezumrpdejqzyrhwden5te0dehhxarj9emkjmn9qydhwumn8ghj7argv4nx7un9wd6zumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tc7xx9t4 account has a rock-bottom WoT, because it has no follows, and my nostr:nprofile1qqsd6ejdteqpvse63ntf7qz6u9yqspp4z7ymt8094urzwm0x2ceaxxgprdmhxue69uhhg6r9vehhyetnwshxummnw3erztnrdakj7qgmwaehxw309a3ksunfwd68q6tvdshxummnw3erztnrdakszyrhwden5te0dehhxarj9ekxzmny7dky6k has a lowish one, as I don't follow that many npubs, but I leave it like that, on purpose.

Your sense of WoT is reverse to the way I understand it. If your nostr:nprofile1qqs06gywary09qmcp2249ztwfq3ue8wxhl2yyp3c39thzp55plvj0sgpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezumrpdejqzyrhwden5te0dehhxarj9emkjmn9qydhwumn8ghj7argv4nx7un9wd6zumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tc7xx9t4 account follows someone, that doesent increase your own WoT; rather it depends on who follows the nostr:nprofile1qqs06gywary09qmcp2249ztwfq3ue8wxhl2yyp3c39thzp55plvj0sgpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezumrpdejqzyrhwden5te0dehhxarj9emkjmn9qydhwumn8ghj7argv4nx7un9wd6zumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tc7xx9t4 account that increases the score. Yes, you don't follow anyone, but that only means you don't need reciprocity due to your own established credibility. The WoT idea is that "high trust" people (who has *your* "trust" which depends on your own follow list and the trust score of who they follow) are depended upon to only follow high-value identities. If your "friend" is following a bunch spam (evidenced by their reposting of crap accounts), you will hopefully unfollow them due to the low value of their posts. Its this score that gives credibility, but only in the sense that the accounts aren't spammers or imposters. The purpose of this WoT isn't necessarily to know who you *should* follow, but to filter out who you *shouldn't* follow and clutter up your feed.

Silberengel 5mo ago

Not having follows is one major reason why I get muted so much and have surprisingly few follows. There are scripts that auto-mute and/or auto-unfollow anyone without follows. It's also a major reason why people refuse to follow me, as they only do the follow-back thing.

My npubs have lots of mutes (also just because I'm such a horrible person and I make people feel unsafe 🙄), which counts negatively toward WoT, and some of the algos deduct points for not having follows, on principle, as we're seen as "refusing to WoT with others", so we get actively penalized.

Brunswick 5mo ago

Maybe the solution is to standardize on a WoT schema, which includes allowing people to decide what contributes to the score and set their own thresholds for muting. I think your beef is with clients that make it difficult to see people on a ban liat, and/or with being binned in with bots and spammers.

Silberengel 5mo ago

As long as follow feeds dominate, I will always be in the bin. Along with anyone new.

Brunswick 5mo ago

> I think follows are commie, designed to reduce our freedom, create rampant shadow-banning, force us to make all of our contacts public and easily searchable, and steer us all to be drooling influencer groupies.

> Everything I've seen happen, on Nostr, since I got here, just solidifies that opinion for me. There has not been any counter-evidence. The whole situation has just steadily degraded.

I'm not sure you understand the main value most people get out of social media. For most, the purpose *is* to be a "drooling influencer groupie". I would bet nostr:nprofile1qqsgydql3q4ka27d9wnlrmus4tvkrnc8ftc4h8h5fgyln54gl0a7dgspp4mhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mqpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgqg4waehxw309aex2mrp0yhx6mmnw3ezuur4vgkhjsen and nostr:nprofile1qqs8d3c64cayj8canmky0jap0c3fekjpzwsthdhx4cthd4my8c5u47spzfmhxue69uhhqatjwpkx2urpvuhx2ucpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduq36amnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3dwp6kytnhv4kxcmmjv3jhytnwv46q6ekpnp have made the same observation: Twitter probably started out slow, with a small contingent of tech-junkies who share a common ideology and high intelligence.

Once it gained networks momentum it gained attention of more widely recognized names, who invested in the platform by sharing their high-signal opinion. Once their "groupies" learned they were on Twitter, they joined primarily to be able to participate in the conversation. This was the original intent, back in the early 90's, why USA Today put journalists' email addresses at the end of their articles; so their readers would be able to shout back, or boot-lick depending on the context.

It was when Twitter became a scientific forum, and a political forum, and a journalist publishing medium, that it exploded with success.

I wouldn't poo-poo the underlying nature of social media, or try to pin it on the common ability to publish who you want in your feed.

Silberengel 5mo ago

It has not escaped my notice that they want to build Twitter 2.0.

Wash, rinse, repeat.