fiatjaf on Nostr: Follower only have meaning if you know where they're coming from. - no one is ...
Follower only have meaning if you know where they're coming from.
- no one is interested in followers if they are fake or bots;
- maybe you are a local pizza shop in Italy so you only care about followers from your town and you won't care if you have a million followers from Colombia, even if they are actual real people;
- a popular polemic public figure may have a ton of followers, but it might be useful to know which of these are sympathetic to their opinions and which ones are just following them for the outrage;
- insert other example here: ____________
Since I believe custom relays are the best way to segregate people (either by natural or by abstract communities, and of course for filtering outright sybil or spam) I also think NIP-45 HyperLogLog addition can fix that by pushing clients to rely on these aggregated counts merged from multiple relay sets instead of trusting one big centralized aggregator:
- no one is interested in followers if they are fake or bots;
- maybe you are a local pizza shop in Italy so you only care about followers from your town and you won't care if you have a million followers from Colombia, even if they are actual real people;
- a popular polemic public figure may have a ton of followers, but it might be useful to know which of these are sympathetic to their opinions and which ones are just following them for the outrage;
- insert other example here: ____________
quoting nevent1q…pedrThoughts about follower counts on nostr. On my phone, I don’t have any way of knowing how many people have saved my phone number/email addresses/etc. in their contacts. And even if I could know, it wouldn’t really have much meaning. What I do know, and what DOES have meaning to me, is that I can quickly access and keep in touch with the contacts that are most important to me. My phone even shows me who I’ve called and texted recently, and has a favorites list, because those are the people I’m likely to contact again.
That’s the direction I wish nostr would go with contacts, instead of trying to track followers and follower counts.
Since I believe custom relays are the best way to segregate people (either by natural or by abstract communities, and of course for filtering outright sybil or spam) I also think NIP-45 HyperLogLog addition can fix that by pushing clients to rely on these aggregated counts merged from multiple relay sets instead of trusting one big centralized aggregator:
quoting nevent1q…sn5eHyperLogLog could fix follower counts, reaction counts and other counts on Nostr without requiring global state -- the idea is that you can fetch counts from multiple relays (only the relays that you trust enough to not lie about counts and not allow spam and sybil) and aggregate them locally without double counting.
It also allow relays to not store events and still provide a meaningful count of them: for example, reactions currently use a huge amount of storage, but a relay could just store a 256-bytes HyperLogLog value representing all reactions it could possibly get for any given event, for example, and still return that to clients and let clients combine that with the values from other relays.
More information here: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/1561