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@ Anthony Accioly
2025-03-31 11:35:13
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.