“The hardest part is helping new users to find trusted npubs to follow” Social onboarding fixes this. Funding is lined up. Dev already started. View quoted note →

> “Could we expand web of trust by having users verify other npubs? Have a "yeah this guy's legit" button or something.” This is the way… but can it scale? We are working on a couple NIP proposals. One will allow users to “sign” the contents of each other’s (identifying) profile fields, verifying that they are not scam or bot accounts. In this way, “trust” is relative to the size and participation of your network. … with social onboarding, trust in this manner is instantly applied to new accounts, greatly accelerating adoption. But still… curation is key.

You're talking about invite-based onboarding?

Coracle uses your follow and mute lists this way. The problems are 1. Private follows, which could become more popular in the future, and 2. Bootstrapping new users. That could be done in a lot of ways, for example with PoW, or an artificial trust rank where services verify the pubkey via captcha, payment, or something else.

I didn't know private follows are being considered. What is the case for those?

follow lists literally are part of this i think if you add in the number of reply/like events from a user to their follows it could work as a trust rating having it in clients to hide your follows would reduce some of the effectiveness of this but at the same time the likes and replies do still exist in public on public events

you could establish some kind of numbers based on engagement too, this would not necessarily be trust but a social graph association weighting

You could base a client-side algorithm on that. The algorithm could see the user's follow list, other users' public follows, and all public interactions. There's plenty of data there that can be cross-referenced into a tailor-made recommendations or trending list, but all the code and data processing could happened securely in the client.