nostr:nprofile1qqsyvrp9u6p0mfur9dfdru3d853tx9mdjuhkphxuxgfwmryja7zsvhqpzamhxue69uhhv6t5daezumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tcpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcscpyug how much of a #Zapraiser do we need for you to remove follower counts from Amethyst? 1M?
Discussion
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Why?
Follower counts aren't accurate. It's a legitimate broken feature that can't be fixed.
They are not entirely useless.
For example; if I hit download follower count on a third party profile, damus shows me people that I know who follow this profile.
Ah okay... Follower lists is sometimes useful to see whether mutual followers are there for some users.
I think follower counts are sometimes useful figure out impersonation accounts, even if they're not accurate
clients can implement mutual followers at the top still. many do this and call it Web of Trust or visual WoT, or mutual followers. i agree that this is useful.
a better solution imo is to show follower counts that make sense, like on npub.world
That’s sort of admitting that nostr is an internet that *needs* a Google. Which is cool, nothing wrong with crawling and indexing per se, but that’s quite a thing for a decentralized protocol to collectively admit.
I don't think that's the case. Nostr can work perfectly fine without "global" counts. But if you want to offer them, then they should make sense
I don’t buy this logic, tempting as it is. Global counts, once available and reliable, sooner or later become indispensable, and from that point onwards saying “it can still work without them” becomes lip service to pure protocol ideology. Happens every time.
Except that global-anything is useless and expensive.
Good search = Good computation = Looking within a likely scope + having a sensible road to follow for deeper digging
Communities (especially when being npubs) are the most underestimated building block for a high signal road to follow.
Question is should Primal, Damus, etc. show follower counts?
No.
They should stop copying Twitter all together.
Their entire UX is built around a global state.
Their "algos" etc, just like Twitters, are only lenses to see the exact same global state through.
A global state that most actually desire, because everyone seeing a different counts, replies, top trends, etc... is frustrating UX.
So either you keep reminding everyone every day that this frustrating UX is actually the "total awesome next internet" or you start trying to become "the global state".
The prevalent Twitter-clones do both.
Their way out is to stop being Twitter and start making room in their imagination for what the Nostr primitives uniquely enable.
For me, that's building interoperable online castles 🏰 that each have their own global state.
>A global state that most actually desire, because everyone seeing a different counts, replies, top trends, etc... is frustrating UX.
This 100% agree. If you make the uncertainty part of the pitch then that's cool, who knows, maybe chaos sells. If you try to hide the uncertainty with pretend absolutes then the UX doesn't just become frustrating, it becomes comedic.
I don't get npub.world Almost every time I search for someone I know is legit (like myself), I get nothing. Literally, some random RSS feed shows near top result for my name. Am I missing something?
Did you find this via search or just append my npub? My understanding was that npub.world is a social graph curated search service. By that metric, it appears broken for me and countless unlucky others who have common names.
My name is Ryan, I have the same same problem 😂 That's why search by npub works too. It's your unique identifier.
If I know the npub, then what's the point of search? To me, search implies I don't already know the npub, but I might have a guess at the name.
Using a common name isn't going to work very well on any search. You can also set up a nip05, then you have a unique identifier that is easier to parse. Having a single, common first name as your identifier is an issue, that's why there are alternatives 🤷♂️
Meta/FB has pretty decent global search based on names only. Yes, it might take a minute of scrolling and profile pic scanning to find my guy, but it works. Yes, I'm aware that comparing NOSTR and Meta is apples/oranges. I'm using them to illustrate how a good, quasi global search UX should handle these cases.
If you had an account named just "Chris" on Facebook it would be basically impossible to find, drowned out amongst tens of thousands of other users, if not hundreds of thousands. I've used that search, it's not that great. My first and last name combination has hundreds of matches, let alone finding an extremely common first name only 🤷♂️
Nip 05 solves this. There are free and paid services, plus it can be set up on your own domain.
Why are you trying to remove features from Amethyst. What kinda CEO are you.
I don't like the follower count but we should not remove it. Instead we can improve it.
it's a bad metric because it's broken and can't be fixed. we don't want a central authority of follower counts. plus, follower counts just leads to egos, emotions, and generally are a dredge on legacy social media. it won't do us any good here either. we should get away from this unhealthy mindset.
Follower count is good for Internet dick measuring and influencers setting rates for shill posts, and not much else.
Unfortunately on a permissionless network there will always be somewhere to get these stats, because there is demand.
I do agree it should be removed from clients, along with the concept of a single "people I follow" list. Multiple lists allowing for organization would be 💯 better. As the size of a single list grows it becomes useless. People lists are in a sad state though, with missing support and interoperability issues everywhere. It's something I hope to see improvements on.
Imagine the names of lists as "tags", and seeing a word cloud of how people you trust had another person tagged. That would be much more useful than # of followers.
it boggles my mind that it's been two years since Lists were releases and most clients don't allow you to create lists or manage them. i want Lists dammit and i don't want to go to an external site to edit them. i believe Nostrudel and Nos are the best at Lists at this time.
Nostrudel unfortunately makes bloated lists with lots of duplicates, concatenating the whole list at the end of the current list when I add another user.
Here's how my carefully named lists created in Nostrudel display on nostr .band, which also has list management. 🤷♂️
That list with 574 actually has 40ish unique users, and a huge amount of duplicates 🤦♂️
It's a sorely needed feature that's an absolute mess.
i haven't looked at my lists on nostr.band in a very long time. i normally use listr and nostrudel to manage them. i wonder if mine look bad there too.
I do agree it's broken but it can be fixed. It should cost 3 Satoshi or more in order to follow someone. Then the majority of your followers would be legit.
It would a massive defense to stop bots from spamming profiles.
Followers/Following list is good because it's a good way to find profiles and metrics. The problem is everyone wants to keep everything for free. Free attracts scammers and spammers. You need to stop thinking in socialst ways and start thinking more in a capitalist way.
that alienates brand new users. it's not good. we already have problems with people thinking nostr.com charges you to register a user account and use nostr. this would justr add to that confusion and turn people away.
You're thinking like a socialist because you've lived in the fiat world too long. You're stuck in the mindset that everything needs to be free in order to attract people—but all you're really attracting are bots, scammers, and freeloaders. Just look at X (Twitter): it looks active, but strip away the bots and spam and you're left with maybe 30% real people. The rest is noise propped up by the illusion of “free.”
Nostr is different. It’s real. It’s organic. It’s growing slowly—and that’s good. Growth should be earned, not faked. We don’t need fake metrics or mass adoption from people who won't stick around. We need users who contribute.
You’re against charging people, but that’s the future. Charging a few sats to follow someone—say, 3 sats or more—would filter out low-effort bots and create a more legitimate network. Follower counts aren’t bad in concept; they’re bad because they’re broken. They’re gamed. They inflate egos. But they can be reimagined to serve a healthier purpose.
You want to remove features like follower counts entirely? That’s not the solution. That’s just giving up. Fix the system, don’t delete it. The real issue is everyone wanting everything for free. That’s fiat thinking. We need to stop thinking like socialists and start thinking in terms of sustainability. If we want a free market internet, we need to act like it.
Who you follow is just a list you sign with your own key. How would you implement paying for that?
When you click on follow you would get a invoice. If you pay it you can follow the profile. If you don't pay it you can't follow the profile. If you unfollow the profile you will have to pay again.
If the profile doesn't have a lightning address then no one can follow the profile.
That whole system is an excellent way to stop spammers and bots and bad actors.
How would you get every client to implement this, knowing that anyone can make their own open source client? You don't need anyones permission to sign a note containing a list of npubs with your own key, which is all following someone is. What you want isn't possible 😂
You're right that anyone can build their own client and bypass it—that's the nature of open protocols. But this isn’t about forcing anything on everyone. It’s about setting a new standard that high-quality clients can adopt voluntarily to improve the network.
Plenty of things in Nostr aren’t enforced by the protocol but are still widely adopted—like relay selection, zaps, or even UI/UX norms. Same thing here. If enough clients and users value this “pay-to-follow” model to reduce spam and bot activity, it becomes a social norm. It’s opt-in capitalism. And guess what? Bots don’t pay.
So no, I’m not trying to restrict freedom. I’m offering a market-based filter for higher signal, and those who want the benefits of a cleaner, more organic network will choose to implement it. You can still go use a free-for-all client if you want—but don’t expect everyone to want that chaos.
It's an idea that would never work, but make the client I guess, see how that goes 🤷♂️
Yes, removal is right. Without an ever-present and in-your-face caveat, it amounts to lying to the user. And that's wrong. We can’t expect a new user to interpret “26 followers” as anything other than “26 followers”. And the chance that 26 followers (or whatever number shows at a given time) is the *actual* number of followers is going to be extremely low—not that we could ever be sure of the number anyway.
Sure! :)
Maybe move follower enumerstion to the relays and not indivifual clients?
Replace it with a verified follower count, where verified means in my WoT.