Community relays have solved the WoT problem, very simply, elegantly, and without requiring rampant nepotism. You don't need to have frens in high places, to get "seen" on a community relay, and it's easy to make new frens. But we can't solve the follow list problem. Almost all npubs are onboarded to the Primal follow list. They usually don't change that preset, much, after that, and if they switch clients, they take that list with them. It's like a software virus, and it has infected the entire network by ossifying everyone's feeds, and constantly doubling-down follows on the same subset of npubs. It's become The God List. The overreliance on follow-feeds also encourages people to use gigantic aggregators as their primary relay (the quality of the relay is then irrelevant), which fills their global feed with spam, bots, and *Horrors Beyond Human Comprehension*. Which means nobody looks at global, even harder. But the new entrants are in global. And all notes stand or fall on their own merit, in global. There is no VIP in global, there's just the notes. This is not good enough. I have not yet begun to fight.

Replies (21)

Josua Schmid's avatar
Josua Schmid 8 months ago
Can you tell me more about the primal follow list? What is it? I guess it’s the “famous” people? Why copy that Twitter mistake? I’d rather like to connect with people from my locality instead. No fame needed to be followed by me. Authenticity and locality would be more important to me.
It's a hard-coded set of npubs that they propose you add to your Kind 3 follows list, when you onboard. To see the complete list, just create a new npub on Primal.net, by clicking <Getting Started> and paging through, until you see the list. There are lots of categories, but they're mostly subsets of main.
Niel Liesmons's avatar
Niel Liesmons 8 months ago
On the first day He created the private key, and called it God. On the second day, He created a list of profiles and called it the "Book Of Influencer Life". If thou are not in it, thou are cast into the void of fire. On the third day, the community crew told him to stop pretending. #blasphemor
Their problem has been that my immediate instinct, when someone comes up with The God List, is not to play nice or lick their toes, to get "hired" onto the list. It's to burn the list. Let's cast that list into their void of fire. image
I guess their next move is to create The God Mute List, to go along with The God Follow List. 😂 Same idea, really. Covert and overt shadow-banning following corporate market capture. But I can stay loud and angry longer than they can stay solvent, so try me. image
We already discussed GitCitadel's contributions to the fund, so that all Alexandria users get to enjoy those features. I will also be making a personal contribution. Let no good deed go unpaid, Nostr.