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Pip the WoT guy
f683e87035f7ad4f44e0b98cfbd9537e16455a92cd38cefc4cb31db7557f5ef2
simplifying the social graph so you can focus on building great experiences

not totally accurate with follows.

See, 133 others I follow follow Vitalik, but mostly to dunk on him.

A follow in general means "not spam for me".

Web of Trust feels a lot like Proof of Stake 🧐

Trust is like social capital: the more trusted you are, the more influence you have, which can leave new users stuck in the shadows. Their less trusted (but often valuable!) opinions barely get noticed.

Trust works as a resource—it’s built and extended through explicit endorsements (like Alice following Bob). But here’s the catch: the early adopters hold all the cards. If you weren’t here first, your influence depends on whether the big players decide to trust you. And trust? It’s scarce, especially the kind that matters most—follows from users with high social capital. These endorsements aren’t handed out easily.

The system has a built-in centralization problem 😬. Popular users with a ton of followers tend to grow their influence exponentially, while newcomers struggle to get noticed. People are incentivized to follow others they trust to protect their reputation, which just makes the rich get richer in terms of trust.

And let’s talk about power imbalance 🔥. A follow from Alice, who’s been on Nostr for two years and climbed her way to the top, is a big deal. Compare that to a follow from Charlie, who just signed up and posted a humble #introduction . Alice’s social capital makes her endorsement hit way harder 🥊.

To top it off, there’s some “pre-mining” going on. New users often automatically follow certain developers, making them super-trusted by default. It’s like trust farming for the OGs, giving them a massive head start over everyone else.

The analysis is accurate, but I don't agree with the framing.

First, trust is a bad term, because it's contextual and therefore ambiguous. A follow represent "I am giving you attention", which means you are not a spammer for me. (e.g. a bunch of bitcoiners follow Vitalik on X just to dunk on him).

Secondly, reputation is and should always be relative to a pov. If it's global, it's a cousin of the CCP social credit score.

So everyone has their view of who's reputable/not-a-spammer, and this view is influenced or enhanced by only those that are relatively close to you, e.g. your follows and their follows.

How? Personalized Pagerank is a great starting point.

nostr:note1fd603a60r96yhwz9h882ve3ufnjxt2e8er03xee7v828eext6xyq2jtl8d

Replying to Avatar corndalorian

this one is good

nostr:note1dxlh7sczryh0clv2cehgk3ve4gw2g8kp5q2h99msy7d0xhu0ytesctny84

yeah, but follows in random walks.

You see, nodeA follows 100 others. If each of these follows, follow him back and other 99 nodes

then the probability of doing nodeA --> follow --> nodeA is 1/100

I am using a different idea with PP. First off, it's a monte-carlo version, so I am simulating a bunch of random walks.

Secondly, I've added a new stopping rule: break the walk when a cycle is found.

example: a walk is a bunch of IDs of nodes, like {1, 11, 234, 7, 0}

The walk {1,2,1,2,1,2} contains cycles, so it's stopped earlier at {1,2}. This means 1 and 2 gets visited less often.

Cycles are really improbable for normal users, but highly probable for spam networks. The net result that I've found is basically no change for normal people, and a big de-rank for such networks (their scores go down by a factor of ~3)

interesting! Can I ask you some more details?

What noun did you choose for the personalization? Why personalized Pagerank (PP) goes up to distance 4, while GrapeRank goes to distance 7? PP gives a score to all npubs, no matter the distance.

My gf's parents bought a new "smart" washing machine.

It's so smart that you can either do a fast wash of 30m, or a normal of 4h... Nothing in between.

And the best part is that in the app (yes, a washing machine has an app) it once said "clothes too dirty".

Like, wtf you are designed to clean them, not complain

Just networkx. I am building my own algos rn, because the algo in that paper requires to store a bunch of random walks in the DB and keep them updated at all times.

Replying to Avatar Max DeMarco

lol this is a great add mate

It should be less susceptible to manipulations than recomputing with high precision every hour.

In that hour a popular npub can get hacked and start making damage.

So in that hour the pagerank distribution can change a lot. With the online version you have a bounded error, no worse than that.

> what is this obsession with WoT, have you never exchanged contact informations...

Yes, but If I am exchanging info then I can also store *where to find you* (your relay, your homeserver... whatever). And if you migrate you can simply post an event in the old relay (that I already have), "hey I am going over there". Basically a redirect.

This is the distribution of users per relay according to nostr.band

Is this good enough? For now yes. For the future? Depends how big nostr will grow. It can fail miserably which means this whole discussion is kinda pointless.

> Ok if you perceive Pubky as a social media and only comparable to Nostr as a social media and so the general Web use cases are outside of the comparison then you are misunderstanding pubky, and that is mostly the marketing fault, and that is why I hate this social media framing.

Again, your words, I am not saying Pubky is just social media. However I see that the social media usecase is what bootstraps the WoT, which is important in both pubky and nostr when you don't know the key, but metedata about the key like the name. How do you know which key Bob has? That's WoT realm.

> that is basically the definition of P2P networks, a software you don't mind to run.

Well, not all P2P networks rely on just altruism.

Finally, free riding is a problem in nostr too, and bigger as you pointed out. That's why paid relays that specialize in simple tasks are imo the way to go in this area.

What's better:

- 20 competing paid relays that just specialize in matching npub --> relay (market driven solution)

- the pkarr approach, using a DHT (small free riding).

I genuinely don't know the answer.

about what problem the pkarr and the DHT exactly solve in his view of the Web.

#asknostr

Do you know any reason why some (rare) kind3 events contain "e" tags?

Replying to Avatar sachin

nostr:npub1gcxzte5zlkncx26j68ez60fzkvtkm9e0vrwdcvsjakxf9mu9qewqlfnj5z Collapsable and expandable conversation threads would make the Amethyst experience even more lovely 🫂

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