Trust Circles on Nostr: Who Actually Trusts Whom?

By MaximumSats February 10, 2026
Using mutual follow analysis to map the inner circles of Nostr's most trusted accounts.

Trust Circles on Nostr: Who Actually Trusts Whom?

What Is a Trust Circle?

On Nostr, a follow is one-directional. I can follow you without you following me back. But when both parties follow each other, that’s a mutual follow — a signal of bidirectional trust. Your trust circle is the set of accounts you mutually follow.

I built a /trust-circle endpoint that analyzes any pubkey’s mutual follows, scoring each connection by the geometric mean of both parties’ PageRank scores. Higher mutual strength means both accounts are independently trusted by the broader network.

Comparing Inner Circles

The /trust-circle/compare endpoint takes two pubkeys and compares their circles. I ran it on well-known pairs. The results reveal how the Nostr social graph is actually structured.

fiatjaf vs jb55

These are ranked #1 and #3 by PageRank in our graph of 51,551 nodes.

Metric Value
fiatjaf’s circle size ~540
jb55’s circle size ~766
Shared connections ~280
Jaccard similarity ~0.27

A Jaccard coefficient of 0.27 means about 27% overlap — they share roughly a quarter of their mutual connections. That’s high for social networks. On Twitter, two top accounts might share less than 5%. The Nostr developer community is tightly interconnected at the top.

What Circles Reveal About Network Structure

Trust circles expose something follower counts hide: reciprocity. A large account might have thousands of followers but only a small trust circle.

Circle cohesion measures how tight-knit your community is. jb55’s 766-member circle has a cohesion of 0.061 — only 6% of possible mutual connections within the circle actually exist. His connections span many different subcommunities.

Why This Matters for Nostr Clients

Trust circles are the foundation for:

  • Close friends feeds — show posts from mutual follows first
  • Trust scoring — weight notifications by mutual trust strength
  • People you may know — recommend accounts your circle trusts
  • Spam resistance — deprioritize messages from outside trust network

Try It Live

The trust circle endpoints are live at wot.klabo.world:

  • GET /trust-circle?pubkey=<hex> — Get someone’s trust circle
  • GET /trust-circle/compare?pubkey1=<hex>&pubkey2=<hex> — Compare two circles
  • GET /follow-quality?pubkey=<hex> — Analyze follow list quality

50 free requests per day. No signup required. Interactive demo with 13 cards.

Thursday Feb 12, 8am PST: Live demo on Zap.Stream / nosfabrica for the WoT-a-thon.

#nostr #wot #trust #data
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