On the outbox model, when a person follows you, the are supposed to send their contact list to your public inbox relays. But many clients don't implement this. :(
Discussion
Oh interesting. This brings me back to nostr:nprofile1qqsrhuxx8l9ex335q7he0f09aej04zpazpl0ne2cgukyawd24mayt8gprfmhxue69uhhq7tjv9kkjepwve5kzar2v9nzucm0d5hszxmhwden5te0wfjkccte9emk2um5v4exucn5vvhxxmmd9us2xuyp's note this morning.
I must be the only npub who has so far advocated for a total removal of follow lists but I stand by it 🐸✌️
What is the use cases that are enabled by sharing contact list when following? Query based upon "p" tag of kind 3, to get following count?
Why doesn't the following list belong at my relays and only there? So a follow and an unfollow, should publish this rather large event to the "targets" relays?
It becomes stale and invalid list as soon as I follow or unfollow someone else.
If I see a good reason to implement this, I'll add it to Nostria. Though it's an event that get's stale very quickly when distributed many places.
I'm not so sure that the 'p' tags in follow lists were meant to notify those people, like 'p' tags in most events do. They were the only tag to carry a pubkey.
In Mosaic I explicitly indicate a "Notify Public Key" tag, and follow lists (not yet defined there) will use a different pubkey tag that doesn't carry the "notify" meaning.
This is because I don't think it is necessary or even very useful to tell someone you are following them, and it erodes privacy. It's tracking. It's like going to a web page and giving them a cookie.