It just occurred to me as I work on custom feeds that the meaning of "follow" on nostr is very different from its meaning everywhere else, because in addition to determining what content you view in feeds, it also can determine which lists, reports, groups, etc. get loaded into your client's local database. Every follow is a starting point for discoverability of everything else in the network (assuming the absence of indexers and algorithms).
Discussion
Hmm. Didn't you post about various types of follows or different degrees of follows a long while ago?
Oh yeah, it's always percolating in the back of my mind
Its a poor representation of trust but it’s one that users are used to and it works ok so far.
Turtles all the way down.
this has always been the charm of this protocol for me, how it's self describing
all the relay tags, the reply tags, the mention tags, follow lists, when you combine it all together it's designed so that it overloads everything with context so that each event refers to everything relevant to it
i could imagine a specialist indexing service that all it does is let you ask about npubs and event ids, and it will spew lists of places it has seen them, a bit like a bittorrent tracker
no consensus needed, just a few extra bytes and you can fall down a billion rabbitholes