Is it me or the stats on https://nostr.band/ always felt disjointed in some way?
nostr:npub1xdtducdnjerex88gkg2qk2atsdlqsyxqaag4h05jmcpyspqt30wscmntxy how many real users do you see according to the trust rank? The stats page says there are over 30 million, but it's hard to imagine that much of even spam, but for sure if there are so many it's definitely most spam, but then there are 50k active users, and the trust page says you don't return low-quality events on the relay interface, but nostr:npub1xtscya34g58tk0z605fvr788k263gsu6cy9x0mhnm87echrgufzsevkk5s has over a million followers when you do a COUNT query, so that means we have at least a million high-quality, trusted, users, but only 50k are active?
But then Nostr userbase has actually grown -- not much, but did -- over the past year, and yet his follower count was already over a million an year ago, so that doesn't make sense.
Discussion
if only there was someone trying to fix these stats 👀
Centrality algorithms is the conversation we should be having.
PageRank being the most famous centrality algo. But it's not the only one. We should be talking about centrality algos and deciding which one(s) to use in nostr.
PageRank was MAGIC when it came out in 1998. It eliminated the vast majority of the spam of internet keyword search overnight. It changed the world.
And it's based on a very simple idea: calculate an "importance" score for each URL. If urlA contains a hyperlink to urlB, then urlB's score gets a boost. And the amount of the boost depends on the importance score of urlA.
So google scrapes the internet, calculates pageRank scores for urls based on hyperlinks, and uses the score to stratify keyword search. Bam. Bye bye to most spammy URLs. Not perfect, but not easy to game.
Nostr needs to do something similar. PageRank for pubkeys instead of for URLs. And instead of hyperlinks, use follows. Or zaps. Or replies. Or all of the above. There is more than one way to build a centrality algorithm.
And one last thing: in principle, we should be using personalized centrality algos, like "personalized PageRank." Because you should always be at the center of your WoT.