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.