I lost it too. :(
I think it has something to do with updating a relay list before your relays and contacts come to the phone. That will make the contact list 0.
To make things worse, looks like relays don't send older contact lists so that we could make a UI to revert to the previous list. 🫤
This is why damus never creates a contact list unless its at account creation. Although this also causes lots of confusion from people who login without a contact list. Best thing to do is keep one cached locally and only create them with a prompt.
But then you run the risk of overriding contacts created outside the app. Same problem: new contacts don't come to the phone fast enough, the app uses the local cache, and people update relays -> new contacts are zapped.
true. I don't have a local cache of things yet. This was something #[5] suggested but i think the override prompt is best. Same thing can happen if you pull an older contact list before your latest one and then follow someone.
And the prompt doesn't save you there either, not sure what the best solution is.
Being able to export your follow list and pushing to the relays?
The best solution is Event Sourcing: don't make a replaceable state, but a list of add and remove events.
Had the same thought.
Wouldn't the issue then be needing a full history of events to recompose the state?
Why not keep a history locally? You could do the prompting or not -- but even then instead of overwriting you still keep the previous versions.
I do like that Gossip keeps a local copy and only overwrites -- or merges upon an explicit button click: 
Someone should also just host a metadata archiver relay that stores all versions of everybody's metadata (by just querying other relays) and then offer a metadata recovery service. Maybe #[0] from https://erdaltoprak.github.io/nostrid/.
I imagine that losing follows and whatnot won't be an issue for people that only use one client, right? And then once you're using multiple clients you should also be open to using a dedicated client just for managing your contacts and so on.
#[9] already keeps metadata history and allows to check it on https://nostr.band .
Maybe it could add also the Contact Lists?
Any plans on storing people you follow locally on the client? Or even being to export a list? Having the same capability would be good for relays as well.
Let us export a file or something.
Yes, this is why I'm afraid of new clients till I get a backup of the contact list. Storing relay list in the contacts list doesn't work very well cause of this chicken egg problem.
