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

“Bootstrapping new users” onto a peer-to-peer trust ranking system is easy… no algos needed … with tools to power “word of mouth” advertising nostr grows AND new users are instantly trusted. #winwin

Meet Me On Nostr

an app for sharing nostr with friends

I'm not sure if they're used anywhere, but private mutes exist. I could see people wanting more privacy forbtheir social graph, that's really some of the most delicate information we have.

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

they would just be private events encrypted to the user themselves that contain follow lists i don't see any reason why not to do them or how it really harms what people are happy to make public the price of many commodities and equities on exchanges have "dark pools" too, people sometimes have reasons for this, but if they interact with their hidden follows they are gonna leak it anyway

There's a tension there, because the social graph is the most game-changing element of Nostr. Nostr as the social layer of the whole Internet is a largely untapped potential, and private follows obviously limit some of that potential. If all social graph data is private, then a large chunk of the Nostr value proposition disappears, IMO. However, allowing users some discretion would be good.

With an approach of 'each client publishes trust assignments then clients calculate trust ranks' private follows can be handled - your trust assignments would give non-zero values to privately followed users (if you so wish) and then others would use that info. Ofc if you want to keep your trust assignments 'private' that won't help. Onboarding for new users is already a problem and requires some input from them - 'topics' etc, some seed from which we could work. Any seed will inevitably lead to some 'preferred' profiles, whose trust assignments can be used to calc trust ranks for this new user and show them something 'trustworthy'. As for bootstrapping trust for new users - this has always happened naturally, through friend (someone invited you to join right?) or through genuine organic interactions (new user interacts with others and they reply and some trust is passed). But organic interactions take time, and also on Nostr it might simply be too costly to organically outpace bots that will try to gain trust the same way. That's the only place where I think PoW makes sense, also trust-bootstrapping services, or OpenTimestamp (onchain tx) with non-trivial fees spent (or a burn - but that's wasteful). Link to trust assignments note: View quoted note →