Dustin on Nostr: If an npub has no follower from within my ‘n’ degrees of followers, why am I ever ...

If an npub has no follower from within my ‘n’ degrees of followers, why am I ever seeing it in my Nostr client?

Is this just a compute problem? If so, let’s start running DVMs to solve this.

Does such a simple solution not work?

Let’s say you are brand new to Nostr. For you to get connected, you’d need to:

1. post a few high quality notes (anything that’s not spam)
2. follow people you like
3. wait for one npub who has followers to follow you.

As soon as 3 happens, you’re good to go. If a spam account gets past this part, you just need a few people to report them and then your client shows you that should be skeptical of this person.

The question then becomes, how do you find new people to follow when there is a flood of potential fake profiles waiting to be discovered alongside new real people?

Best case solution, you meet anyone in real life who has a Nostr account and they follow you.

Worse alternative is bootstrapping from legacy social media.

There will probably be markets in the future selling you access to Nostr networks (pay me to follow you and add you into my WoT). You could be anonymous this way.

Maybe AI search tools will be able to pick out some authentic profiles just by the content they post.

Moral of the story is - the incorrect solution here is to KYC or scan eyeballs for “proof of human”.