I really love how, in Damus, people that you don't follow show up as npubs rather than their name most of the time.
Quick and easy way to grok whether you already follow people in a conversation.
Discussion
I am confused, I don't think Damus works that way, at least not my current version (TestFlight). Damus tries to load every avatar as soon as you see a note from this npub. Those avatars are cached (quite new feature), regardless of follow-status.
It’s the @ mentions in replies that are showing truncated npubs. I haven’t seen any unloaded avatars.
Sorry, my explanation was bad. From observation I think this is what damus is doing: Damus shows names instead of npubs, if they are loaded. As soon as Damus shows a note, it tries to fetch the metadata of the author (kind-0 events), including name, avatar and so on. So once you have seen a note of somebody the name is shown instead of npub. Recently Damus introduced caching, so this metadata remains restarts. Maybe metadata are preserved longer, if you follow someone. But I do see names of profiles which I don't follow.
Cool. Yeah that makes sense. Caching is a massive improvement btw. 🙌
Yea true ... we are learning how nostr works lol