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 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. 
 You don’t even need a central server to have good search. The damus profile database gets filled up with not too much use. https://i.nostr.build/oxgw.jpg  
 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.