Long term solution will require a general framework for the decentralized curation of knowledge, which is what I’m working on. (To that end, I’ll probably be issuing some bounties soon. Know any devs who want to stack a few sats? Send them my way! 😊)

Short term: if I ran one of the popular nostr clients here’s what I would do. It’s imperfect but quick, easy and probably pretty effective.

Assume that if Alice follows Bob then she probably kinda sorta trusts his judgment when it comes to muting scammers. (Not necessarily true, hence the “imperfect” qualifier. But probably good enough for a quick fix.)

Periodically comb through the mute lists of all your follows + their follows.

F1 = number of users one hop away, and F2 = number of users two hops away.

If Charlie shows up on someone’s mute list, then C1 = the number of times Charlie is muted by an F1, and C2 = number of times Charlie is muted by an F2.

In settings, have a button which when activated will mute anyone if either of the following conditions hold:

If C1 > 3 AND C1/F1 > 3%

or

If C2 > 5 AND C2/F2 > 5%

Something like that. Play with the numbers to find the right balance. Don’t want innocent people to get muted by accidental fat fingers. The reason for the percentages is that you want to make a system that works for everyone, whether you follow 10 ppl or 10,000. You could make the 3 and 5 adjustable parameters, although maybe that’s too much complexity for the user?

Honestly I don’t know why Twitter never did this.