I've been blocking any npubs that dont follow anyone, and my feed is already better. #grownostr
Discussion
Oh I like that Maria! Need to learn how to do that
Wish there was an automated way to do it. I've just been clicking on any profile that shows up on my feed that i dont follow. If it doesnt follow anyone, i block it. A few at a time.
Here's a good one to block nostr:npub1l5sga6xg72phsz5422ykujprejwud075ggrr3z2hwyrfgr7eylqstegx9z
nostr:nprofile1qqsd6ejdteqpvse63ntf7qz6u9yqspp4z7ymt8094urzwm0x2ceaxxgprdmhxue69uhhg6r9vehhyetnwshxummnw3erztnrdakj7qgmwaehxw309a3ksunfwd68q6tvdshxummnw3erztnrdakszyrhwden5te0dehhxarj9ekxzmny7dky6k, to be absolutely fair, I know you have other ways to keep up with people (I use encrypted lists and custom feeds myself). But the policy of not following folks has consequences for the wider network.
For example, if I follow you, WoT relays won’t be able to translate my trust in you into trust for the people you follow. So none of the good folks you trust would be able to write to my relay. Also, curious users won’t be able to find me or other smaller accounts by checking who you follow. In an unintended way, this contributes to Nostr’s centralisation around celebrity accounts that you are fighting against.
Don’t get me wrong. I totally get what you’re doing here and understand that public follow lists have their downsides. But they also have their benefits. And only following accounts that are equally willing to follow others publicly sounds like a very fair quid pro quo policy in my book.
Yo, I'm fine with that. 🤙 Ya gotta do, whatcha gotta do.
Following feeds dark, totalitarian impulses, but I'm a very respectable, recovering anarchist.
I don't do follows, I don't do Facebook, and, no, you can not reach me on WhatsApp.
If your WoT is too retarded to figure out who I trust and who I don't, then you should send your dev back to the drawing board, because the 1990s called and they want their algo back.
We all do what we gotta do and act according to our beliefs. I don’t use Meta products either, but I don’t think following lists are what’s broken with Facebook, Instagram, etc.
As for other ways to figure out who you trust for WoT, have you even tried it? Devs are more than welcome to contribute to Haven or any other WoT-capable relay, but I really wonder what their attack plan would be. There’s too much noise in Nostr lists and sets to extract a good signal. Plus, many clients encrypt list/set entries (as intended).
Doing it any other way (e.g., scanning all of your notes to infer your levels of trust in others) just puts an unnecessary burden on both my relay and yours for a very niche use case that could easily be exploited. For example, what if I baited you into rage replying to me 30 times? Am I now trustworthy? And then what’s next? ML sentiment analysis to determine if our interactions are worth "trustworthy" points?
All of this to accommodate a few people that aren’t willing to follow others... On a decentralised social media protocol with primitives for following others. Sounds like a not worth the effort / never going to be implemented kind of thing.
IMO, publicly following someone is a statement of trust, like signing someone else’s PGP key. I’m happy enough to interact with people who aren’t willing to sign my PGP key, but I’m personally not willing to sign theirs. This is core value for value, in this case, public attention of trust for public attention of trust.
There is absolutely no statement of trust in most people's follows. Some of them just follow everyone back, who follows them, with a script. Their follow lists are a hot mess.
I gave up on the whole concept, after getting sent pics and replies from people that were so vile, that the relay and media server admins had to delete them. Only to discover that they were being followed by some of my follows. Not to mention, all of the spam and scammers and imitators they follow. People's follow lists quickly grow so large, that they can't even examine them, in their entirety. Full of npubs that they know nothing at all about.
Also because the list kept getting wiped out and I discovered that nobody had bothered figuring out how to measure who you were interacting with; all they can do is restore a list. Mark Zuckerberg implemented the follow list in the 90s and a lot has happened, in computer science, since then.
Look at this Maria2000 npub, here. She (it?) interacts with about 10 npubs, but follows over 1000 of her nearest and dearest friends, that she has never once interacted with and whose stuff it doesn't actually consume, or who might not even be here, anymore, or who might have sold someone else their keys. Anyone who follows her is getting that entire crappy follow lists dumped into their relay, with the Seal of Approval from someone with nearly 3500 npubs (whoever or whatever they be).
Have we forgotten how many people followed-back an npub literally named "Reply Guy"? I mean, good grief. Kept that crap in people's feeds for days and drove away a lot of users.
All your criticisms of WoT (and Nostr’s ever-disappearing follow lists) are valid. And yes, plenty of people follow bots. While people like to take a piss on PGP UX (which, again, is mostly valid criticism), PGP's bad UX and its appeal to security/privacy-oriented types make PGP WoT networks much tighter. Unfortunately, this also works against Metcalfe’s Law... I do understand people who just want to connect and follow lots of other nostriches. They are doing important work as well. So, as every difficult problem in life, we need to find some balance between the two ways of thinking.
I complement my WoT relays with TheForest1, both so that folks outside my WoT can reach out to me and as a fallback during attacks, outages, etc. Charging a few sats and effectively moderating content is certainly a valid approach. Meaning that I’m not a WoT zealot, nor am I against other ways of doing things (except for moderation by blacklisting NIP-05 domains, which is something that really broke Mastodon and, in the long run, introduces fragmentation and fragility).
However, I still believe in and see a lot of value in WoT. For example, nowadays I "work around" this problem by unfollowing folks who follow bots when those bots make it into my WoT. But yes, I agree that this is not ideal.
My idea here, and this is just a sketch of a sketch of an idea, is to introduce something akin to PGP ownertrust levels: https://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual/x334.html
This way, I can give full trust to folks who understand the WoT aspect of things and are willing to maintain a clean follow list. I'll likely assign unknown or marginal trust by default for other people (e.g., we could have a policy where if someone is followed by 3, 5 or whatever number of my followers, they get write access to my relays - akin to what Haven and utxo other WoT relays are currently doing), and, of course, I csn assign "none" to people I like enough not to unfollow but who have demonstrated a tendency to follow bots, impersonators, etc.
Given the complexity of managing this sort of trust score, I don’t think a lot of folks would be willing to use this. But it’s something feasible to implement that would solve my own problems with WoT without, you know, downloading everyone’s timeline, performing sentiment analysis, and using other big-tech algorithmic tricks.
As for the disappearing follow lists problem... This is one of the harder "nostr clients are misbehaving" problems that smarter folks than me will hopefully fix. To be fair it has been several months since I last had to restore my followers list, so, in a way, the problem has been getting better. But yes, it is an annoying problem that may drive nostriches away from the network altogether.
I feel like you're just hanging on to the follows thing because it's already there, which is fine.
But I think I have a strong case for making it obsolete. We'll see. 🤷♀️
Not really 🤣. I think that YOU have a strong case to make it obsolete. Again, I respect your "dark patterns/totalitarianism" position, but it's not mine at all. All tools, including public follow lists, can be used for good or for evil. I think that public following, despite its downsides, is a fundamental way to drive discoverability in decentralised social media. I want to fix follow lists, not get rid of them.
That said, I will defend everyone's right to use encrypted kind 30000 sets, special relays, algorithms, and any number of other tools, including those I'm not particularly keen on (I have my own views on bad incentives). I'm also more than happy to discuss and explain my views to others, as long as they don't try to impose theirs by force (e.g., "let's deprecate follow lists by force now" or "let's impose algorithms," etc.).
To be even more candid: I actually like the fact that everything on Nostr is supposed to be a signed attestation. This includes making your follow list public (as you are doing right now by following the projects and devs working with you). Benefiting someone or some project with social media visibility through Nostr network effects should be intentional. Not following anyone publicly is also an intentional attestation of your beliefs. It has its pros and cons, as I pointed out in my first reply.
I don’t need to agree with you to interact or even collaborate on things we both believe in. Heck, there are plenty of points where I strongly disagree with fiatjaf and utxo, yet here I am contributing code to Haven, Khatru, etc. I may change my mind about some things, they may change theirs about other things, or none of us may change our minds at all, and that's absolutely fine. In my books: being opinionated is good; public discussions are good, cult-like assimilation and closed-doors decision imposed top down are bad.