Folks who simultaneously follow and mute the same npub… can you explain why you're doing it? 🤔
Was it intentional? Is there a specific client that requires you to follow someone just to add them to a list, even if you don't want them showing up in your main feed?
What exactly are you trying to accomplish?
Signed,
A perplexed dev trying to understand whether mute lists should play a role in the WoT.
#asknostr #wot #mutelist #nip51 #kind10000 #kind30007
Temporary mute. Person goes on a streak of notes that is annoying. Easiest to mute to hide from timeline.
Ah, simple use case that I've failed to see. Thanks!
While the person that you are temporarily muting goes on with their annoying notes, would you personally still like to receive DMs and notes that you are tagged in by the npub in question? Or would you like it to be a total mute and discard everything from him until you remove the person from the mute list?
You can like a person and not like their content
Got it, thanks!
So when you dislike someone's content but still like the person, would you want your immediate network to still see their content? Or the opposite?
Basically, I'm trying to understand what this means (assuming it means anything at all) in terms of "trust".
Are you neutral about it? Would you want to grant that npub write access to your relay, help spread content you don’t necessarily like, and effectively "vouch" for the npub trustworthiness to people who follow you?
Or would you prefer the opposite? Or neither?
30007 is mute people for kind, where are you seeing these things?
Mostly kind 10000 (which a surprising number of clients don’t encrypt), but it can also be done with kind 30007, which presumably carries less weight than 10000. I mentioned both because I was wondering if folks might prefer different WoT behaviours, for example, 30007 might be seen as more "neutral" than 10000. You might want to mute someone's Kind 1s but still receive their DMs. No idea if it means anything in terms of "trust".
Public Mute should influence social graph, private mutes only serve you, the wot of many bots go to zero if the mutes are private, it is something to keep in mind
Makes sense, and agreed. Still… it's a difficult ecosystem, with clients and users doing things in very different ways.
For example, some clients encrypt all tags in the user mute list; some people may argue that even publicly muting someone shouldn't influence the social graph; and kind 1984 is what should really count as negative signal.
But then again, NIP-56 specifically asks relays not to perform automatic moderation based on reports... But (but after but after but), one could argue that aggregated results based on WoT analysis (where one trusted npub report = one vote) are a bit harder to game.
Lots to think about, and no easy answers here.
My current take is that people use all these tools in such unique ways that it may be better to keep a private ownertrust list for keys in the relay itself…sort of like how PGP does it.
I.e., I'm leaning toward using the followers list to build the trust graph, ignoring all other kinds, and allowing users to privately set how much they trust a given npub.
For example:
1. I follow a certain npub but don’t trust it at all because I know it follows bots, ignore it when computing WoT scores.
2. I marginally trust an npub, so I’ll use its follow list for the WoT score. If 3 users follow a npub, I'll trust it as well (default case - What we do in HAVEN right now)
3. I fully trust a key, so I’ll allow all of its followers to write to my relay
My dilemma is that a PGP-like WoT is too complex, and I don’t want to build yet another model that only security folks can use. But then again, I’m struggling quite a bit to simplify it. It feels technically correct… just… hard to use.
yes all those settings should be within a protocol which is very difficult to implement, quite subjective
Some clients make you autofollow a bunch of users which could explain this.
A simple cypher query of my graph db shows 13 npubs that have muted themselves 🤷🏻♂️😂
Yeah. Kind 10000 is totally broken. Other than folks doing weird stuff themselves, clients are writing garbage to it, sometimes completely breaking the list. With list encryption standards changing to NIP-44, most clients (and even relays) are now limited to 65 KB payloads. I’ve also found several massive mute lists around Nostr.
Conclusion: this is beyond broken. While there’s certainly some potential signal, I don’t think I’ll bother with it for WoT purposes. I’ll stick to Kind 3 and 1984 only.
Generally it’s just bad UX, since the features are not related in any way. I’m sure if clients had a “mute & unfollow” action, people would choose it.
Bad UX, bad standards, bad implementation of standards, bad attitude from devs when you point out that the bad implementation of the bad standards is bad... Bad, most everything.
And the suggested fix is always somewhere on the spectrum between “let’s do nothing” (you know... users who follow or mute people are terrible and using Nostr wrong, so they deserve to suffer) and “let’s nuke everything and start over”... Nuke mute lists, nuke follow loats, nuke remote signers, nuke the standards, nuke central repositories. Replace everything with something conceptual and poorly communicated, with no guarantee of sane evolution or compatibility, and where nobody is accountable for anything.
Keep Nostr a hobbyist playground and drive away the folks actually working hard to keep everything running despite all of the above. Or at least do whatever you can to keep them out of the loop... anything to avoid transparency or actual communication.
Apologies, I’m just in a bad mood about many things regarding Nostr development. I should really step away from it for a bit. I need to push some bug fixes to Haven that I’ve been cooking for a while, and I’ll likely focus on non-Nostr things for a while.
No, you’re not wrong. Coming at this from a perspective of a user attempting to vibecode useful tools to manage follow and mute lists is a real eye-opener. I’m seeing firsthand how broken some of this stuff is.
Agreed. For example, the stuff you raised about signing follow and mute lists over remote signers was handled piss poorly. We could have merged the NIP-44 encryption fix and got it adopted by a few relays and clients. Either that or just rollback to NIP-04. Then, we could have raised the max event size on a few popular relays (yes, they can handle a 300 500 KB payload over WebSocket with proper rate limits just fine), and that would have been enough to accommodate things for now.
After that, we could think about a more granular model for following events, as well as how to evolve encryption more sanely. Instead, we’re back to telling users they’re using Nostr wrong; trim your follow lists to 200 people, or just stop following anyone altogether and go touch grass. Say something, and you’re a negative Nancy... I’m just feeling a bit done with all of this at the moment.
And don’t get me started on deleting and editing kind 1 notes! 😆
