Kind 3 was probably a mistake, following could have been local or private by default, and assigning public "trust" to people could have been taken a more intentional form, with more structure to it rather than "whoever I want to see posts from I put in this list and now that person gets an endorsement from me".
But following people is still a good thing.
I do think the focus on following people should be drastically reduced (no one can really "follow" more than 100 people) and that we need more opinionated relays like wss://theforest.nostr1.com/ and more tools for browsing relays, recommending relays, publishing to specific relays.
It shouldn't be necessary for a new user to click on a follow button hundreds of times in order to get a feed. Clients shouldn't be required to send many hundreds of REQs (most of which will be about pubkeys that haven't posted anything for months) to a bunch of relays in order to build a default feed. That number can be cut drastically and Nostr can still work fine, in fact much better.
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Yeah, it's why Jumble works quite smoothly, even though it's "only" a web app. Just slow-drips in the feed from 1-n relays and basta.
I don't "follow" a lot of people on my Kind 3 list, which means those few people get a noticeable WoT bump from me. Those are clearly npubs I am _actively recommending_.
I added a "lists" filter to the feed, and it reqs for the deduplicated aggregate list of all npub lists I select.
The current follow problem that I have can be solved client-side; where one can see whether the follow is reciprocal (why doesent Amethyst have this?) and how long since that person has been "active." (e.g. likes, zaps, profile updates, posts, replies, etc.) Then it should be trivial to unfollow dead accounts and the follow-list is more meaningful.
The public aspect of follows has a wot side-effect, which is also a primary feature. When I'm searching for a profile, I look to see if anyone I "trust" is also following that profile. When people demonstrate they are either worthless or spammy, they tend to get pruned from most lists. The WoT score based on follow, activity & reciprocity has more power than it regarded to.
What a follow-based WoT means in the context of social media is whether the followed identity is likely to be authentic and of information-value, not necessarily whether you agree with that identity. (I follow @Robert Reich for god's sake)
This stuff about "not needing to press follow a hundred times" and "updating their follow list on the relay every time the button is pressed) has no traction in my mind. One can modify a client to batch follows, like in @npub189j8...3tg8. What you are describing is personal feed curation, and many intend this to be public. Some people may want a public follow list, and several separate private follow lists (to avoid endorsement), but this is a power-user feature, and probably too complicated for the "average" person.
To separate the WoT feature from the follow feature is an interesting idea, but also likely to never be useful due to lack of use. Normally people have no idea whether a person they are following is a real person, or even an honest person. In that regard, a "trust" button would never EVER be used. The purpose of a follow-backed WoT is not to endorse, it's so others can see what you want to see, regardless if you "endorse" them or not.
We could generally add the “feed” to this category of problems.
I use nostr to see what people are up to. Like on the internet, I like to seek out information or getting personal recommendations.
I don’t understand these channels/feeds/tags mania since I started not using Twitter in 2010.
It’s all a full-text corpus in the internet, properly addressable, searchable (even better now with RAGs) and with strong authorship (pk crypto).
I also don’t get structured logs btw.
I think we should all stop caring about what other ppl do on nostr, fr who gives a shit about how many ppl users follow