Primal’s trending algo is no longer easily gameable by bots. We implemented a new system based on web of trust. We will publish more details soon, but the high-level idea is to infer humanity of a pubkey based on its connections in the social graph. As always, full source code for this system is open and available in our repo.

Given this new capability, we removed everyone from the "can't trend" list. This means that every Nostr account is able to trend on Primal; they just need to post a note that produces genuine user engagement. We will monitor the results of this, but it is possible that a global "can't trend" list is no longer needed.

The best part: Primal’s trending feed got a whole lot better!