Nostr’s main innovation is the public declaration of trusted keys (follows) in a signed event by each user.
That’s what sets it apart from other publib key cryptography schemes, which usually delegate the format of that follow package to other standards that never take off.
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Good, but that selects for the outgoing. Just like society must create a culture to defend against the lower aspects of human nature, there must be a duty to seek out new, unrecognized value, and tag spam, for instance. I would use a client that shows me a random note that has been marked spam, or a random new npub to rate, prior to accessing my graph.
That forces people to use secondary npubs to follow unpopular people or people who they dont agree with, just to protect their ‘reputation,’ which will be defined as ‘system by which dishonest people win through gaming.’
PGP (the dream, not the stack) comes to mind. I don’t know if the follow list of a blue sky account is public or not and to what point they match the definition, but there were many other prototypes over the years.
Can you say more about other standards that don’t take off in this context? I think you are right, there is something very novel about public keys becoming a networked graph to build trust. Is blue sky an example of an alternative approach to this ?
It’s like a party, just walk up and start talking to someone. That’s how you make friends- a skill that is all but lost nowadays. No, ai won’t do it all for you. That’s it. You’ll weed out the people you don’t want to chat with.
The more interesting problem is how new npubs break into the web of follows. It’s impossible to say which note would be the seed, but once one person engages, somehow that seed starts to grow.
Yeah, I agree it’s probably the best heuristic (so far), but I would quibble with calling it ‘great’. It’s perfectly fine for estimating a user’s reputation; but clearly, a set of followers is sorely lacking on its own for determining the reputation of a product, merchant, etc (when reputation really matters, IMO)… it’s just that an npub-linked reputation of such things won’t be particularly relevant until having their own npubs becomes much more relevant (or maybe that’s a chicken-and-egg thing)
Reputation I think is the right word. A healthy set of followers is a great heuristic for a good reputation.
And have existed for more than 3 years now.
That is a very good point. It would be a mistake to necessarily conflate “trusted keys (follows)” with a system for tracking reputation (i.e. something that doesn’t yet exist in any meaningful way on Nostr, AFAIK).
npub world is definitely a good first step 👍
this is your problem 😅
💯 this.
Killing spam is then a matter of how to best analyse these events.
It’s not trust, is “non-spamminess”, which actually goes a long way.
All the results and searches you make on npub.world uses the follow heuristic.
Give it a try and tell me if it works well for you.
Private lists already exist, so it’s surely possible.
Maybe the set of users that I fully trust could be a secret. i.e. This set is stored in a relay, but encrypted such that only I can decrypt the result to see the npubs which I really trust
There’s pubky/pkdns. Bit different though, your public key is your DNS, stuff hosted on your DNS is you. But still comes down to you being a public key.
Yes. All the pieces already exist, user lists are a thing. Amethyst can use them, but it lacks the ability to create or manage them. The current follow list could remain, as the trusted user list.
True
This.
I would like a list specifically for trusted people, plus the ability to make other lists for people who I want to see their notes. A single list for follows is too limiting. It’s like email with no folders, just an inbox. I miss the circles concept from Google Plus.
I don’t trust the people I follow. Only a very small subset of them.
I haven’t seen anything outside of Nostr that treats cryptographic keys themselves as identity, so I don’t really know about others — but don’t others sign follows with their private keys? Unless a system doesn’t treat the public key itself as the identity at all, I can’t imagine a design where follows aren’t signed with the corresponding private key.
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