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 How is it true? My clients just show me what the people I follow publish; or do you mean that popular accounts get more kind:6s thus the people I follow give some popular pubkeys a disproportionate amount of visibility? 
 For me it's the mechanisms here that have cemented to a certain extent the taste makers, incentivised appealing to these accounts for visibility to a certain extent - in their replies and boosts. The recommended users, the 'trending' lists etc. Regurgitating or even just copying bitcointwitter talking points and 'memes' is somewhat (unintentionally?) rewarded.

Obviously, you can just post whatever you like and not play along, you may find your experience is more like posting into a void, or an unread (micro)blog. Someone with a niche interest might post, they may get some interaction. I don't think people are ignoring or discouraging this, but they'll probably find they're not finding a vibrant community around many/any other topics, not getting a vibrant conversation on other topics, and feel somewhat compelled to return to the safe bets of bitcoin 'memes' and slogans, being reply guys to large follower accounts.

I think an alternative trending algo which takes into account follower numbers as a percentage for likes. Eg a 50k follower account with 70 likes should'nt be 'trending', but a 400 follower account with 20 likes could be... Something like this as a factor thrown into the mix. As well as a proper forum/topic -follow clients, rather than the twitter clone clients, could help this situation. Maybe.

nostr:nevent1qqsx0e45zs9ken2yzhefmmyp09w9dnmgm4efszur2dgurxt8m73f6yszyzw2p0t52p6z663qxxwqu02vv7wfupr2nhrsarh4ts5stcjq2g6qkqcyqqq823cvyap7d 
 Liking this idea of alternative trending algo that boosts signal based on %s 
 We've been recommending such algos, for at least a year, already. 🤷🏻‍♀️ 
 It's a classic chicken and egg problem, and it's very hard to solve. I'm all for experimenting with new and different algos, but it probably won't move the needle as much as time will.  
 Definitely think time is needed. I think a tweaking of the mechanisms (or meta or whatever you want to call it) could help slightly and increasingly so over time. 
 I don't think you can leave the client architecture as-is, without it getting steadily worse.

Everyone's follow lists are becoming more and more concentrated because the bifurcation in numbers of followers has reached absurd levels, due to the heavy onboarding concentration to Primal.

People used to onboard to different clients, which each had its own discovery method. Now, it's like a funnel. 
 Is primal the most used onboarding client? I imagine it is up there. I wish they would even add some other options to their sidebar panel, something like 'hashtag discovery', even nostrband's daily trending users list is more interesting and useful than what is on offer now. No idea how hard this is to implement tho lol? #primal 
 It's not hard. It's just not wanted. Software design is about making choices, and they have made other choices. 
 You, and other Very Big Npubs, have a completely outsized impact. It's like the Elon effect, but there are 20 Elons.

You have over 600k followers. Even supposing only 10% are "real and active", which is very low, if you boost or quote something, it will likely trend because it ends up in 60000 npubs' feeds.
If I do the same, it ends up in 70 npubs' feed.

Everyone is looking at what you are looking at. 
 but is it worse here than other social media ? example bluesky already seems to be way more parasocial, lots of accounts with gazillions of followers that only post and never interact, that seems less so here
there's less focus on following and follower numbers here which has its advantages 
 I could complain about Elon and Twitter, on Twitter, without getting shadowbanned.

I didn't need Elon to follow me and recommend me, on Twitter, for people to see me.

That's a distinction, with a difference. 
 haha true, it's a matter of scale too i suppose

Elon can't exactly personally keep track of billions of users and shadowban everyone who complains about him, nor does X have the staff for that

new users on X start deeply buried, basically shadowbanned, in a kind of sandbox that watches behavior if they're a bot or spammer or scammer, it sometimes misfires and the user gets banned until they dox themselves
(and actual scammers have clearly learned how to fool this system better than normal users)

there is some kind of reputation system that decides when to let you out and how much to show your posts to random others
it's just all hidden to users
 
 Well, we have that, too. Try to get anyone to respond to you, if you have less than two followers. Assumed to be spam.

That's why the spambots all follow each other, on here. 
 I also understand the reasoning, but ditto not showing accounts who don't have a nip05 doesn't really help. But the spambot dilemma is also a nasty one to solve  
 Nostr is when you can't complain about the software program using the software program.  The equivalent to not being able to complain about Thunderbird in an e-mail sent from Thunderbird. 
 is it that bad?
a client equivalent of mastodon's instance politics?

but yea nostr has a unique combination of FOSS politics and a social network, a different one than mastodon/fediverse, though there are similarities as well, and it may become more similar in the future as there's more adoption and spam/abuse 
 It's a different clique, but it's equally insular and myopic. 
 right, to some degree people are people, there are some social dynamics that are unavoidable, i guess, no matter the intent of the designers 
 Designers always have a target user group, that they are designing to cater to. If that group is "Furries" or "BitcoinTwitter" or "Fashionistas" or "Bible Thumpers", etc., or something similarly specific, then the software will cater to that group.

You have to decide to cater to a much larger and more heterogenous group, to get a different result. That's why communities are the answer, not asking the BitcoinTwitter people to Bitcoin more quietly in their BitcoinTwitter clients on their BitcoinTwitter relays.

Communities are specifically designed to each appeal to different demographics, without the designer having to aim at that demographic. He just builds a platform, that people can "plug" their community into.

If the Furries want to leave Fediverse and come to Nostr, they should do it into a Fediverse Community. Not land in a BitcoinTwitter community, and be like 😱 Where Furries? while people throw steak at them and tell them to stack sats. 
 “while people throw steak at them and tell them to stack sats.” 🤣 🤣 
 We tried to onboard a real-life human female, and she got piled on, by a bunch of memers, and was mass-muted into Nostr nonexistence because she's not a native English speaker and they claimed she writes like a bot. Then I pointed out that our team's sys admin knows her personally, and they were like "Nobody knows him; he's just a scammer."

That doesn't happen, in communities. 
 that's nasty

fwiw, it seems that bluesky looks at the browser language, then by default it shows posts in that language in the discovery view
which was really confusing to me because i interact with the internet pretty much in English only, but i imagine for most people that's a good choice 
 Most of the Germans on here write in English. 
 Yeah, it got ugly. Nobody ever apologized, either.

I guess you got here after they tried to chase me off with dickpics and scat-eating pics in my replies, rape threats or threats to come to my house, bot armies aimed at me, etc. Had to constantly report, report, report, which is why I usually only read from relays I control, now.

Theforest is the result of me trying to figure out how to use Nostr without just being harrassed, the whole time. That's why I know so much about how all this works. 
 i'm so sorry to hear that 🫂 

honestly that was kind of my worst fear when coming here
i haven't actually seen that much really ugly stuff here
which gives me some confidence that this can work
but we'll see i guess... 
 It took us a while to get rid of them all. 
 Never thought I would ever use the phrase "toxic bitcoiners" in the Bitcoin community, but yes, they are overinfluential in nostr.

Do most communities get along well? 
 i think the idea of communities is that they don't have to, they can just post their own stuff in a sort of bubble 
 I know. I was curious for other reasons. Meh, It's not important.  
 This may well be an accurate description of the current status of the nostrverse.

But, I don't think it's the big Npubs' fault.

I rather think this is mostly the inevitable dynamic that occurs in a system that's designed in this way (no feed algorithms at all).

And I think it's kind of a bootstrap dynamic that mostly characterises the beginning of the network.

After this initial phase I'd assume that other dynamics will evolve. New social circles/ sub communities will form around high impact accounts that have nothing to do with the initial big Npubs.

So I think we need patience and we'll get slow evolution, because every npub is slowly bootstrapping their way according to their interests. 
 The slow evolution of each npub's follow list is where I'd like more tools from the client devs.

I'd like features that help me with systematic management of my follow list(s).

Example:

Give me a single button on each note (accessible without _any_ additional tap/click, so that it's minimal effort) to mark the note as "interesting/relevant to me".

Then show me statistics from these marks so that I can directly see for all my followed npubs:
- number of notes seen in the last x days
- % of these notes marked as relevant
- ... 
 Another Example for a feature:

Somehow help with categorising followed npubs.

Categories could be:
A, new info npubs (news bot or heavy poster, never replied to any of my replies, not following me back)
B, high volume poster (not news bot like A, but frequent posts in discussions)
C, low volume poster (but is following me back, replied to a few of my notes)
D, ...

And for each category I'd like a separately scrollable feed. 
 Plot twist: I didn't realize I wasn't following you until just now because people I follow boost you a lot. 😂 
 You must follow very clever people. 
 Hell yeah I do.  
 Granted that visibility should not be a claimed right, the basic difference is that Nostr offers a basic feed (the fake “Global”) that is so chaotic that it is used by few to discover new content. I think the solution is to create one's own circle and with that go and merge with other micro groups, thereby growing the social graph. And at the same time enhance the discoverability of content through search and thematic structures. Shadowbanning does not seem to me at all the correct term for the current situation. 
 It's the correct term, when done in a coordinated, intentional manner. Even when I'm recommended as additions to the lists and etc. (which happens not infrequently), they just ignore the recommendations or explain that I'm not the sort of person who should be on the list.

Who is "the correct sort of person"?
Anyone but me.
Anyone but me is the correct sort of person.

Okay, that's fine, but that just means the client isn't intended for use by anyone who wouldn't think I was an incorrect person. I'm a litmus test. Perhaps they should write that in their advertisements: 

This client is not intended for use by anyone who might be tempted to read something written by Silberengel. 
 "Coordinated, intentional manner" seems a quite serious claim.
What clients and lists are you talking about? 
 Well, it starts with the fact that I'm constantly being muted by some of the biggest npubs. Only thing worse than not being followed by them is being muted by them. Their mute list is often just me, some crypto spam, bots who post gibberish, ReplyGuy, and some hardcore porn. That's how much they absolutely despise me and these people DETERMINE WHAT WE LOOK AT.

Then, they get my npub recommended to them, as a good follow, and they're like *shudder* no way. "She's stupid. Nothing she writes is interesting. She does not respect TheDevs. She doesn't even have a grant. Nobody likes her. She doesn't understand computers. She's a Marxist. She's AI." And etc. Etc. Etc.

Someone with a big account telling everyone I'm a horrible person basically takes me out of the running.

Then, they ask around for people to add to the recommendation list, who write about something other than Bitcoin and I never make that list, even if people actively suggest me. I'm one of the few active npubs that actually writes anything. There are hardly any real writers, here. I'm an asset, but they don't want people to see me. They would rather people see nothing, than see my stuff.

These people have it in for me and they completely own this place, and they own it even more, ever day. 
 None of this should matter to me, is the point I'm trying to make. A handful of people shouldn't be able to decide what everyone looks at. 
 I've seen the mutes.  
 It's not that difficult to log into any user's npub to see what they see either. Maybe client devs should do that once and a while.