Oddbean

But user created individual lists don't scale, do they? Isn't this the exact same as Twitter lists users create and maintain? I follow a few Twitter lists but I barely maintain them, it is time consuming. Correct me if I'm misunderstanding here. (That happens often) I totally agree with you about community and creating a web of trust. I'd say we should have communities by themselves. If NIP-51 supports lists, it can be a list of people that follow a focused community. So, instead of following individuals, you follow a topic. #hashtags work kind of well but I still don't think that's the best way to go about this. My goal: follow a topic where a group of experts post notes we can interact with.

Yes, maintaining lists manually is time-consuming. That is why it must become native to the workflow of Nostr. When I click "follow user" I have abandoned maintenance of my "followed users" by design. Saying everyone exclusively belongs to a single list is a hindrance from the start. But it isn't useless. It's just difficult to manage. That is why I propose both actions. I should be determining which list a user belongs in, and that action should also include them in a global follow list. This way we don't lose current functionality but we also gain a layer of user authority.

That's a good question! I don't have an answer exactly, because I've only recently followed you. However, I could imagine "insightful, creative, anonymous, stranger" as a few potential associated feelings. Personally, I would lean toward a "nostrich natives" list, that eventually gets broken down into more unique lists. This would be my "preferred feed," I think. But that would probably change over time. I would already have multiple lists and feeds as a result. However, for people I am closer to, or more familiar with, I could probably assign them more specific roles. For instance, if you develop an application for Nostr, I could upgrade you to my "Nostr Devs" list, which would surely exist! If I could tell your application wasn't, say, "top notch," but rather amateurish, I would probably have at least 2 lists of Nostr devs. "Official Nostr devs" and "Unofficial Nostr devs". This goes against the narrative that everyone is equal on Nostr, but, in my head, everyone isn't equal. It's a personal perspective and everyone would have different feelings toward it. That is why it is important for us to have fluidity in regards to follow lists. So we can "upgrade, downgrade, remove, add, sort, filter, share" the people in them. It's also important that a person can be within multiple lists, of course. I'm not sure why I feel the need to specify that, but in case it isn't clear, there can be overlap.

Sorry, I meant to clarify on my point when I said "everyone isn't equal." This is in regards to how we create lists. We are going to have a bias which applies to each person and there will be overlap. That is the point. In terms of categorizing each other into unique lists, we aren't "equal," we are managed.

Say you add me to Unofficial Nostr Devs but then someone else might not agree with it, what will they do then? Create another list saying "unofficial unofficial nostr devs". I think lists for certain topics are cool. For example, people are discussing about OP_CAT on Bitcoin, a list of people that are talking about it would be great for me to follow the discussions. Generic lists come with a lot of conflicts I feel. Also, why would you create and maintain a list? Are you simply making an effort for the community? You will get bored after a while since you are not getting paid for such a list.

There is no consensus mechanism in my proposed lists. They would be private to the user. The goal is to separate friends into unique feeds via NIP-51 kind 30000. This can already be done and is integrated. You can separate people into a list and generate a feed with only their posts. I believe this should be native to the workflow of all Nostr applications, though, making NIP-02 (follow list) a "kind" of list within NIP-51. Then replacing NIP-02 with NIP-51. The idea here is to create unique groups of friends from the beginning. They are not meant to be shared, only maintained and appreciated by the individual user. Web of Trust, however, does aim to curate lists in a decentralized method of emergence, which mirrors Bitcoin. It is the 'other path' of managing groups of users, which would entail deciding "who belongs where" as well. Both paths require a manual creation of friend groups/lists. Web of Trust offers an automated path in the future.

To add to my previous comment, it would become a responsibility of client applications to "handle lists better." Nostr needs to lay the foundation so clients can offer proper tools for managing these lists. Imagine filtering by "people you haven't categorized yet." You could automatically see who you haven't sorted. You could quickly change the label of a group or split people into new groups. If you were using Nostr in a CLI, it's probably not very efficient. But that is a minority of people. The majority of us are using web clients. CLI tools could certainly be developed to handle lists better as well, if desired. Twitter lists only list people using Twitter. Nostr lists are globally decentralized, unlike Twitter. I have a Twitter account and have never touched lists. I wouldn't even know they exist because I don't have a reason to use Twitter. I am sure I'm not alone. The point is that Twitter lists can only scale to the size of Twitter. On a decentralized protocol they have more room, and reason, to scale.