I just accidentally muted someone and went to unmute, and it's like... Damn, like looking for a needle in a haystack. 😂 

 3) network and storage load - both follow and mute lists in some cases are exceeding single figure kilobytes in size, this is a problem  

 That's true. Some relays will eventually cut off long mute lists, as well, as they have max-event-size. 

 half a megabyte is probably typical, but i can see that being reduced

there is also data storage strategies that could at least shrink those long strings of repeating pubkeys down to small, varint references, and existing data stores have compression to reduce such duplication of data but at some point the network is gonna be the big pain point 

 We'd end up muting a botfarm and losing the mutes for the hardcore porn and Neonazis. Decisions decisions. 😂 

 client devs are gonna be forced to pay attention to this soon as DAU keeps ticking up 

 DAU? 

 daily active users 

 Yeah 💯
This shit don't scale, y'all. 

 Do we need to read the list?

Performance makes sense, good point. Especially with the volume of bots.

Are you proposing a barrier that prevents bots in the first place? Some sort of filter so they don't even reach the point where they need be muted? 

 Well, some relays already remove them with spam filters.

I'm suggesting client settings set to whitelisting schemes, rather than blacklisting. 

 Right 

 You then need to think about discovery, so that people can find more npubs to whitelist. Otherwise, they'll get bored.