Oddbean

by far the worst part of the Nostr experience is trying to find known contacts. NOSTR fans are doing themselves a massive disservice telling the public "oh it works for me, just try a different client I guess" we either need a much better solution for identifiers on a protocol level (NIP-05 or whatever is not doing it) or we need an encouraged standard across clients, that, upon download or setup, LINKS twitter/other social media data to your Nostr NPUB and links you up through that. Get community to vote + verify profile connections to add social credibility I'm not a dev so I don't know the solution/tradeoff but to this day I cannot find the people I want without an NPUB, and that is just not a usable format

Interesting... did you have a mutual friend / follower that already had me followed? Amethyst, Iris, Plebstr, Nostrudel, pretty much all the good android + web options have awful search unless you are a massive account like @LynAlden or @jb55 that can't be the standard if we want to make a serious push for new users

Good point, I was already following you lol. Just tested with a random person I wasn’t following and it did work there though. May have been because I found one of their notes from another search and their name was cached somewhere locally for me.

Primal has a caching server that calculates things like how many followers a person has and they use that to sort the search results. In nos.social we don’t, yet, have that, so we sort by mutual followers. Both do a great job at finding the right @fiatjaf but overall popularity isn’t as good when you’re looking for your friend Matt. For new users who don’t have anybody then the overall popularity is better than mutual follows. Coracle calculates and displays a kind of Web of Trust (WoT) score for each person which is nice. All of which would be improved if we had a good way to say, this is the Matt who you’re following on twitter/mastodon/instagram or have the email / phone number of.

k you have me though already followed? I had a friend join NOSTR the other day through Damus I believe. She goes by @ RilezKirk No posts yet See if you can find the account via search and share the NPUB, I'll tell you if it's the right one NONE OF the 8 clients I tried could find her

Right now most clients don’t use relays that host and share just contact and profile information. We were using purplepag.es by @PABLOF7z until we added that functionality in to our own relay.nos.social. I think using those is a stop gap, but we need a better solution to finding people and contacts.

Primal runs its own caching and search relays to make the experience better. It’s written in Julia! That’s not a language I’ve come across since I was hanging out at MIT. We need multiple compatible services like what primal is doing.