Spend enough time on Nostr and the place starts developing recurring characters.
Not specific people. Types.
You begin recognizing them before you recognize the account.
The Bitcoin guy with the orange avatar. The protocol developer who hasn’t slept since NIP-19. The privacy person who considers your browser choice a moral failure. The old internet guy quietly watching everyone rediscover things IRC solved in 1998.
Nostr is still small enough that personalities matter. That is probably one of its better features.
Large social networks eventually sand everybody down into content categories. Nostr still feels like somebody opened the doors to an unfinished warehouse, turned on a few relays, and invited hackers, artists, farmers, Bitcoiners, photographers, programmers, cranks, builders and one completely normal person who is now very confused.
He came for sound money and stayed long enough to explain why your entire monetary system is wrong.
You could post a photograph of a beautiful sunset over the Pacific.
He sees monetary debasement.
A dog gets rescued from a drainage pipe.
Fiat caused this somehow.
Somebody asks whether anyone knows a good recipe for sourdough.
Hard money.
He doesn’t necessarily bring Bitcoin into every conversation intentionally. At this point the conversion happens somewhere below conscious thought.
The Bitcoin maximalist is one of the native species of Nostr because Bitcoin and Nostr share a lot of cultural plumbing: self-custody, distrust of centralized intermediaries, open protocols, keys, sovereignty, censorship resistance and an unusually high tolerance for staring at QR codes.
Some are thoughtful.
Some are brilliant.
Some have been having the exact same argument since 2017 and will continue having it after the sun expands and consumes the Earth.
You will eventually learn the dialect.
“Study Bitcoin.”
“Few.”
“Stay humble.”
“Stack sats.”
The remarkable thing is that sometimes underneath all the repetition is somebody who actually understands money, cryptography, economics, mining, energy markets or network incentives extremely well.
Other times it is a man with a laser-eyed profile picture telling a plumber in Ohio that grocery inflation can be traced directly to Richard Nixon.
Both are part of the ecosystem.
2. The Nostr Protocol Nerd
Normal people use the app. She has questions about event kinds, relay behavior, NIP compatibility, and why your client is doing that weird thing.
This person does not use Nostr.
They inspect it.
You say:
My follows disappeared.
They say:
What kind 3 did your client publish?
You say:
I don’t know.
A small part of them dies.
The protocol nerd knows the difference between an npub, a hex pubkey, a relay hint, an event tag and whatever new thing somebody proposed three days ago that has already generated six competing implementations.
They have opinions about NIPs.
Not casual opinions.
The kind of opinions normally reserved for zoning disputes and inheritance battles.
You will see conversations where two otherwise reasonable adults spend forty-five replies debating whether a behavior belongs in a client, a relay or the protocol itself.
Do not interfere.
This is how standards are made.
These people are also the reason Nostr keeps becoming more useful instead of remaining a fascinating purple terminal experiment for twelve guys.
When something breaks, they can usually tell you why.
Unfortunately, the explanation may contain the phrase “replaceable event semantics.”
You asked for this.
3. The Hacker / Cypherpunk
Encrypt everything. Trust little. Read the protocol before arguing about it.
You do not know his real name.
This is intentional.
His profile picture might be a skull, a historical figure, an obscure piece of ASCII art, a satellite dish, a cat, or nothing.
He has been thinking about privacy longer than you have been thinking about the application currently requesting access to your contacts.
The hacker/cypherpunk does not necessarily distrust you personally.
He distrusts systems.
Governments.
Corporations.
Cloud dashboards.
Phone numbers.
Identity providers.
Browser telemetry.
JavaScript from domains he did not personally compile yesterday afternoon.
This person can occasionally sound insane right up until six months later when the thing they warned about appears in a headline.
Then they become annoying in an entirely different way.
Nostr attracts this personality naturally because the protocol begins with a premise the cypherpunk understands immediately:
Your identity can be a key.
You don’t need permission to create it.
That is approximately enough information to make this person disappear into a terminal for four days.
They may return with software.
Documentation is less certain.
4. The Anonymous Guy Fawkes Type
People, not platforms. Preferably people wearing masks and making centralized systems nervous.
Different animal.
The hacker may simply value privacy.
This guy has aesthetic commitments.
Guy Fawkes mask.
Black-and-white imagery.
Anonymous references.
Possibly some Latin.
A bio that makes you suspect a government somewhere has been formally placed on notice.
He posts like every message may later become Exhibit A.
Sometimes he’s deeply informed about censorship, surveillance, propaganda and civil liberties.
Sometimes he is reposting an image of a wolf with the words:
THEY FEAR THOSE WHO THINK.
The line between dissident and Facebook uncle can become technically difficult to establish.
Still, this personality fits Nostr unusually well.
Pseudonymity feels natural here. There is no requirement that an account resolve into a LinkedIn profile, employer, verified badge and smiling photograph taken against an office wall.
You can simply be an identity.
That brings good things.
It also brings somebody named SOVEREIGN_GHOST_1776 explaining geopolitics at 3:14 in the morning.
Open networks contain multitudes.
5. The Linux / Self-Hosting Hermit
Could pay someone $5 a month to host it. Instead built a server rack, learned three new daemons, and ruined an entire weekend.
You use Gmail.
He has a mail server.
You use Dropbox.
He has Syncthing.
You use Spotify.
He has 14 terabytes of FLAC files and a Jellyfin instance with a hostname based on a Tolkien character.
You ask:
Where is your website hosted?
There is a pause.
Here.
“Here” means approximately six feet away from him.
The self-hosting person sees every service as a future weekend project.
Sometimes this saves money.
Sometimes he spends $680 replacing three subscriptions that collectively cost $14.99 a month.
This is not the point.
The point is that he owns the box.
Nostr makes immediate sense to these people because relays look less like mystical infrastructure and more like another daemon they could probably run on an old mini PC in the closet.
They have opinions about Docker.
They have stronger opinions about Docker Compose.
One of them is currently writing a 900-word reply explaining why systemd isn’t actually the problem.
Nobody asked.
I read it anyway.
6. The YouTuber / Independent Creator
Make the thing. Post the thing. Get zapped for the thing. Somehow avoid becoming a full-time thumbnail designer.
You can identify the creator because the lighting in his room is better than the lighting in your entire house.
Microphone.
Camera.
Acoustic treatment.
A suspiciously clean shelf containing three books placed at angles no human being has ever naturally stored a book.
But the independent creator has a legitimate reason to be interested in Nostr.
Platform dependence sucks.
Spend years building an audience on somebody else’s website and eventually you realize that your connection to those people is conditional.
An algorithm changes.
Reach falls.
A channel gets demonetized.
Some automated system decides your perfectly ordinary video about vintage lawn equipment contains dangerous content.
Now you are appealing to a dropdown menu.
Nostr presents a different idea.
The creator can establish an identity and social graph that aren’t entirely contained inside one company’s account database.
That’s attractive.
The difficult part is explaining Nostr to an audience whose normal relationship with technology is:
I clicked Subscribe.
So the creator spends fifteen minutes explaining public keys.
Half the audience leaves.
Three people become relay operators.
This is how it spreads.
7. The Meme Lord / Shitposter
He joined Nostr for decentralization and stayed because nobody could stop him from posting absolute garbage at 2:17 AM.
Do not underestimate this person.
They appear useless.
That is part of the camouflage.
While everybody else is discussing decentralized identity, censorship resistance and protocol design, the shitposter has taken a screenshot of the conversation, added a raccoon holding a handgun, written “NIP-420 IMPLEMENTATION COMPLETE” across the top, and received more engagement than the entire technical discussion combined.
Civilizations need these people.
Without them, every social network eventually becomes a conference hallway.
The good shitposter understands timing.
They know the recurring personalities.
They know which arguments happen every week.
They know which technical failure can be converted into an image before the developer who caused it has finished writing the apology.
This is cultural infrastructure.
Very stupid cultural infrastructure.
Still infrastructure.
The danger is becoming the person who can no longer communicate except through memes.
At that point somebody asks whether you are coming to dinner and receives a photograph of Michael Saylor glowing over a medieval battlefield.
Seek help.
8. The Homesteader / Off-Grid Bitcoiner
Solar power, clean air, good food, hard work, and fewer systems asking for permission.
This guy has chickens.
This is important.
Nostr somehow contains a surprisingly strong population of people who can explain both multisignature Bitcoin wallets and the correct depth for a fence post.
They are not theoretical decentralization people.
They already moved somewhere with three neighbors and intermittent cellular service.
Solar panels.
Garden.
Tools.
Possibly goats.
Definitely a generator that has developed a personality.
The off-grid Bitcoiner looks at the normal modern stack—bank account, subscription services, centralized platforms, cloud storage, corporate employment, grocery supply chain—and begins removing dependencies one at a time.
Eventually he is standing in a field holding a phone running a Nostr client while a chicken attacks his boot.
There is something strangely coherent about it.
Digital sovereignty meets actual dirt.
Also, if civilization collapses, follow these people.
The protocol developer cannot help you with potatoes.
9. The Artist / Photographer
Photos, stories, people, places—and somewhere in the middle, a better internet.
Thank this person.
Without artists and photographers, Nostr would contain approximately eleven million screenshots of terminal windows.
The artist arrives carrying color into a culture that occasionally seems convinced dark mode is a personality.
Photography works particularly well on Nostr because images don’t need much explanation.
A storm.
A street.
Somebody’s dog.
A weird building.
A portrait.
A sunrise from somewhere you will never visit.
Suddenly the feed feels inhabited by humans again.
Artists also test whether a network can become something larger than its founding technical culture.
A protocol can begin with developers.
It cannot stay there forever.
If Nostr is going to matter as a social place, it has to contain people who do not wake up thinking about relays.
Someone has to paint the thing.
Someone has to photograph the people.
Someone has to make the interface look less like a router configuration screen.
Let them work.
10. The Old Internet Veteran
He survived dial-up, Netscape, personal websites, IRC, and forums. Nostr feels less like the future and more like the internet finding its way back.
You can recognize him by the thousand-yard stare he gets when somebody announces a revolutionary new decentralized chat room.
He has seen chat rooms.
He has seen all the chat rooms.
BBS.
Usenet.
IRC.
ICQ.
Forums.
Jabber.
RSS.
Blogs.
Message boards run by a dentist in Nebraska.
Personal websites containing twelve megabytes of animated GIFs and more useful information than half the modern web.
The old internet veteran doesn’t hate new technology.
He is simply difficult to impress.
You say:
Nostr lets anybody run infrastructure.
He nods.
Good.
You can use multiple clients.
Better.
Your identity isn’t trapped inside one company.
Now he’s listening.
The reason Nostr sometimes appeals strongly to older internet people is that parts of it feel less like a futuristic social network and more like a recovery operation.
Protocols.
Clients.
Servers.
Keys.
Independent implementations.
Different interfaces accessing the same underlying world.
The internet used to contain much more of this.
Then everything became five websites.
The old internet guy remembers.
Unfortunately, he will now explain RSS to you.
You have thirty minutes.
11. The Reply-Guy Philosopher
A simple Nostr reply enters the room. Three thousand words on human nature leave it.
Somebody posts:
Beautiful weather today.
He replies:
Weather is interesting because technically you’re observing a local manifestation of a planetary energy system, but what we call “good weather” is really a culturally mediated preference based on…
Seven paragraphs later, sovereignty has entered the discussion.
Nobody knows exactly where.
This person does not necessarily have bad ideas.
Quite the opposite.
They often have too many ideas, and every post is a hole into which the entire intellectual history of Western civilization may fall.
You mention privacy.
We are discussing Hobbes.
You mention Bitcoin.
Here comes Aristotle.
Someone posts a sandwich.
Property rights.
The reply-guy philosopher is one of the reasons small social networks can be entertaining.
There is enough space for actual conversation to mutate.
Threads wander.
People disagree.
Somebody cites a book.
Somebody else posts a meme.
The original sandwich is forgotten.
Three people follow each other.
This is arguably healthier than an algorithm calculating that the sandwich should be shown to 2.7 million people because sandwiches currently have strong retention metrics.
12. The New Nostr User
Every Nostr user starts somewhere: relays, keys, NIPs, zaps, and approximately 47 new questions.
Finally:
You.
Possibly.
The new user arrives with perfectly reasonable expectations formed by every social network built during the last fifteen years.
Then Nostr starts speaking Nostr.
npub
nsec
relay
NIP
zap
kind 1
kind 3
NIP-05
NIP-19
“Which client are you using?”
“Which relays?”
“Back up your keys.”
“Don’t paste that there.”
“GM.”
At some point the new user realizes they accidentally entered a community where normal social behavior and protocol engineering live in the same room.
This can be intimidating.
It can also be one of the interesting parts.
The beginner starts following people.
The feed wakes up.
Somebody replies.
A few accounts become familiar.
A first zap arrives.
Maybe they try another client.
Maybe they discover that one person can move between clients without creating a new identity every time.
That is usually the moment the underlying idea becomes visible.
Then, six months later, this same beginner is replying to somebody else:
Wait. Don’t publish that follow list yet. Did your tool merge the existing kind 3?
The transformation is complete.
Nobody Is Actually One of These
That’s the trick.
The most interesting Nostr users are usually several of them at once.
The homesteader runs Linux.
The photographer is a Bitcoiner.
The protocol developer shitposts.
The anonymous privacy guy turns out to be an excellent painter.
The old internet veteran has a YouTube channel.
Some completely ordinary person quietly runs a relay.
The categories collapse once you know people.
That’s probably healthy.
Nostr is still strange enough that the humans haven’t disappeared behind the platform yet.
You generate a key. Pick a client. Fill out a profile. Follow a few people.
Then you look at the feed.
Six people are talking. Three are discussing Bitcoin. One hasn’t posted in four months. Somebody else is having an extremely detailed argument about Lightning liquidity.
Nostr isn’t empty.
Your view of Nostr is empty.
That distinction matters.
Unlike a conventional social network, Nostr does not have one company maintaining one global social graph and deciding which recommendation system everybody gets. Individual clients can provide trending feeds, recommendations, search, discovery systems and their own ranking algorithms, but your personal follow graph remains one of the fundamental ingredients in what you see.
You need somewhere to start.
Then you need to make that starting point your own.
It contains 1,000 Nostr public keys assembled as a starting social graph rather than a random pile of relay output.
The list favors useful, established and active-looking Nostr participants: developers, Bitcoiners, technical people, artists, community accounts, regular users, internet weirdos and other accounts likely to lead somewhere interesting.
Obvious NSFW accounts were filtered.
Obvious junk and spam bots were reduced.
The download is deliberately simple:
1,000 public keys
plain text
one 64-character hex pubkey per line
no private keys
no account credentials
no dependency on a particular Nostr client
It is not the 1,000 Officially Correct Humans of Nostr™.
It is a good starting pile.
The entire point of the rest of this guide is learning how to gradually ruin my carefully curated list by turning it into yours.
What Is a Nostr Follow List?
At the human level, a Nostr follow list is exactly what it sounds like:
a list of public keys representing accounts you follow.
At the protocol level, things get more interesting.
NIP-02 defines the basic Nostr follow list as a kind 3 event containing p tags. Each p tag identifies a public key being followed. Relay hints and local names can also be included.
The important part: a new follow list replaces the old one
This is one of those small technical details that becomes very important approximately five seconds after you ignore it.
NIP-02 specifies that each newly published follow list replaces previous follow lists. The new event is therefore expected to contain all the follows you intend to keep, not merely the new ones you want to add.
Suppose you already follow 75 people.
Then you use a terrible bulk-follow tool that publishes a kind 3 containing only 1,000 new keys.
You may not end up with 1,075 follows.
You may end up with the new 1,000.
Your carefully chosen original 75 have departed for whatever afterlife abandoned pubkeys inhabit.
A good import workflow should therefore:
retrieve your existing follow list;
preserve the existing pubkeys;
add the new pubkeys;
remove duplicates;
publish the complete resulting list.
Back up your existing follows before doing bulk operations.
This is not paranoia.
It is considerably easier than reconstructing your social graph from memory.
Why New Nostr Accounts Have a Cold-Start Problem
The protocol can identify your account.
It cannot know what interests you.
That has to come from somewhere.
Your follows tell your client something enormously useful:
Show me these people, and use this part of the network as a place to begin.
Some clients supplement that with global feeds, popularity rankings, recommendations, hashtags, relay discovery and other mechanisms.
Good.
Use them.
But those discovery systems do not eliminate the underlying problem.
A new person still needs an initial view into the network.
Six accounts are not Nostr
A common onboarding mistake is following a few famous accounts and assuming the resulting feed represents the network.
Follow five Bitcoin personalities and Nostr looks like Bitcoin Twitter with different plumbing.
Follow five developers and Nostr looks like twelve people arguing about event kinds.
Follow five meme accounts and your assessment of human civilization may decline sharply.
Your sample determines what you think the place is.
This is why I prefer a broad starting graph.
Not because you should permanently follow 1,000 strangers.
Because you need enough activity to observe the network before deciding which parts of it you want.
What the CacheRat Nostr Follow List Actually Contains
The 1K Curated Starter Follow List was assembled from public Nostr account discovery, existing social relationships, follow data and known account sources.
Then it was reduced into a smaller starter set.
The selection was deliberately biased toward accounts that could make a new graph useful:
established Nostr participants;
active users;
developers;
Bitcoin users;
technical accounts;
artists and creators;
community accounts;
people involved in actual conversations;
useful automated accounts where appropriate;
assorted internet people who make the place less boring.
It also deliberately tries to avoid obvious adult-content accounts and unnecessary bot garbage.
What “curated” does not mean
It does not mean every person has been identity-verified.
It does not mean I endorse every opinion from every account.
It does not mean all 1,000 accounts are equally active.
It does not mean nobody on the list will become annoying next Thursday.
A Nostr public key establishes control of a cryptographic identity.
It does not establish sanity.
This is a starter follow dataset, not a moral certification authority.
That distinction matters.
Why the Download Uses Hex Public Keys
If you’ve spent much time using Nostr clients, you have probably seen identifiers beginning with npub.
The underlying public key can also be represented as a 64-character hexadecimal value.
NIP-19 defines the familiar Bech32 forms used by Nostr, including npub. The specification provides examples showing the relationship between an npub and its corresponding hexadecimal public key.
Fortunately, once you have enough initial connections, Nostr becomes much easier to explore.
Look at who interesting people follow
If somebody consistently posts material you care about, inspect their network.
This is basic social-graph traversal.
Interesting people frequently know other interesting people.
Not always.
Sometimes they follow 4,000 accounts and apparently believe filtration is an activity for cowards.
Use judgment.
Read replies
Replies may be more valuable for discovery than timelines.
A good conversation exposes multiple participants who share enough context to discuss something but not necessarily the same opinions.
If somebody repeatedly makes thoughtful, funny or useful contributions three levels deep in a thread, open the profile.
You found them naturally.
That’s considerably more valuable than following someone because a giant directory said IMPORTANT NOSTR PERSON #27.
Search subjects, not people
Search for things you actually care about.
Programming.
Linux.
Photography.
Bitcoin.
Homesteading.
Music.
Retrocomputing.
Economics.
Game development.
Ham radio.
Whatever has colonized your brain this month.
Topic discovery often produces a better network than personality discovery because you’re finding people through work and interests rather than popularity.
Use hashtags properly
Hashtags can expose conversations beyond your existing graph.
Use them as topic indexes.
Search them.
Notice recurring names.
Follow the people who repeatedly contribute material you want.
unless the post somehow actually concerns all eight.
Hashtags work better when they describe things.
A revolutionary concept.
Use discovery feeds as discovery feeds
Trending, global and recommended feeds can be useful.
But I would mentally separate their purpose from your following feed.
Discovery feeds are for exploring.
Your following feed is where you live.
If global is noisy, good.
It is global.
You don’t need to move in.
Nostr People to Follow: How to Judge an Account
People occasionally ask for the “best Nostr accounts to follow.”
I don’t think that’s the right question.
Best for what?
A cryptographer, photographer, farmer, gamer, Bitcoin developer and person obsessed with vintage washing-machine repair diagrams are going to construct completely different networks.
Instead of asking whether an account is universally good, ask whether it improves your graph.
Here are the things I look for.
Originality
Does this account produce anything?
Original writing.
Photography.
Code.
Research.
Jokes.
Observations.
Art.
Technical answers.
Interesting questions.
Personal experience.
Anything.
An account does not need to be educational, but there should eventually be a reason you recognize the name.
Signal
Do you repeatedly get something from seeing the person’s posts?
Information.
A new idea.
A useful link.
A laugh.
A disagreement worth thinking about.
Discovery of somebody else.
Signal does not mean Serious Intellectual Content™.
An account that reliably makes the internet more entertaining has signal.
Conversation
Does the person actually interact with other people?
Broadcast-only accounts can still be useful.
But conversational accounts frequently provide much more discovery value because every worthwhile conversation opens another branch of the network.
Posting frequency
Frequency is part of quality.
Somebody can be brilliant and still occupy half your feed.
You are allowed to decide that 93 brilliant observations before breakfast is more brilliance than you currently require.
Topic fit
Do you actually care about what this person talks about?
Don’t keep accounts because you think a sophisticated Nostr user is supposed to follow them.
It’s your feed.
Discovery value
Some accounts are useful partly because they lead somewhere.
Good reposts.
Good replies.
Good recommendations.
Good discussions.
They function as junctions in the network.
Those are often worth keeping.
Bots Aren’t Automatically Bad
The word “bot” gets used as if automation itself is the problem.
It isn’t.
Automation can produce genuinely useful feeds:
repository updates;
network information;
weather;
specialized news;
monitoring data;
scheduled reference material;
alerts;
feeds imported from other sources.
The question isn’t:
Is this account automated?
The useful question is:
Do I want what this account produces?
A bot posting useful information twice a day may improve your feed.
A human reposting the same political argument forty times may not.
Judge output.
Not species.
What bad automation looks like
The garbage becomes recognizable quickly:
meaningless repetitive posting;
stolen or mechanically scraped content;
automated replies with no relationship to the conversation;
engagement bait;
constant promotional repetition;
endless repost loops;
duplicated material;
volume vastly exceeding usefulness.
That’s the stuff the starter list attempts to reduce.
You will still find things you don’t want.
Good.
Now you know what to remove.
Follow, Unfollow and Mute Are Different Decisions
People sometimes treat every unwanted account as a candidate for muting.
That isn’t necessary.
NIP-51 distinguishes the normal follow list from the mute list, which is specifically intended for things users do not want appearing in feeds or notifications. A mute list can identify pubkeys and other unwanted material.
I use the concepts differently.
Follow
I want more of this account in my normal network.
Unfollow
Nothing necessarily wrong here. I don’t need this in my normal feed.
Mute
I specifically don’t want this appearing.
Those are different judgments.
Someone posting about baseball doesn’t need to be banished to the shadow realm because I don’t care about baseball.
Unfollow works.
Save mute for things you actually want suppressed.
Nostr Starter Packs, Follow Sets and Follow Lists
Nostr has evolved beyond one giant undifferentiated follow list.
NIP-51 defines multiple kinds of lists and sets.
A normal NIP-02 follow list remains kind 3.
NIP-51 also defines follow sets as kind 30000: categorized groups of users that clients can treat separately. And it now defines starter packs as kind 39089, described as named sets of profiles intended to be shared so they can be followed together.
These concepts overlap, but they are not identical.
Follow list
This is your normal social graph.
People you follow.
Follow set
A categorized group of accounts.
You might imagine sets around:
developers;
photographers;
Bitcoin;
local people;
artists;
news;
ham radio;
whatever else requires its own drawer.
Starter pack
A shareable named collection of profiles intended to help other users discover or follow a group.
This is especially relevant to onboarding.
It formalizes something Nostr users have been doing informally for years:
Here are some people worth looking at if you’re new.
So why sell a plain-text list?
Portability.
A plain-text file does not require your client to implement one particular UI or NIP.
You can inspect it.
Script against it.
Convert it.
Import it into tooling.
Store it.
Deduplicate it.
Throw half of it away.
Raw data survives interface fashions remarkably well.
Your Follow List Is Only Part of Nostr Discovery
A person can exist in your follow list and still seem strangely absent.
This is where relays enter the picture.
Nostr clients exchange events through relays.
Following a public key does not magically place every event by that user onto every relay your client happens to query.
Modern relay discovery helps solve this.
NIP-65 defines a replaceable kind:10002 event through which users can advertise relays where they generally write and relays where they expect to receive mentions. Clients can use this metadata to improve event discovery and publishing.
This matters because:
“I followed this account but I don’t see anything from them.”
does not necessarily mean:
“This account is dead.”
It may be a relay problem.
Or a client problem.
Or a filtering problem.
Or the account may actually be dead.
Welcome to distributed systems.
More relays are not automatically better
There is a wonderfully persistent instinct in technical communities:
If four servers are useful, forty-seven servers must be extremely useful.
NIP-65 specifically recommends that clients guide users toward relatively small relay lists, around 2–4 relays in each category.
The objective is not to accumulate relay URLs like baseball cards.
The objective is reliable event distribution and discovery.
A good client should handle much of this for ordinary users.
But understanding that relays exist will prevent a lot of incorrect conclusions about missing accounts and missing posts.
How to Turn 1,000 Strangers Into Your Nostr Follow List
Now we get to the point.
You bought or imported a starter list.
The feed works.
There are people everywhere.
What next?
Don’t sit down and manually inspect 1,000 profiles before you’re allowed to enjoy yourself.
Use Nostr.
Let repeated exposure do some of the work.
Stage 1: Bootstrap
Start with enough accounts to make the network visible.
That’s what the 1K list is for.
Stage 2: Observe
Notice who keeps appearing.
Notice who annoys you.
Notice who teaches you things.
Notice which conversations lead somewhere.
Notice which accounts consume enormous amounts of space without giving much back.
Stage 3: Discover
Start adding people who were not in the starter list.
This is important.
People you discover yourself are the beginning of the graph becoming yours.
Maybe you find them through:
replies;
searches;
hashtags;
reposts;
articles;
recommendations;
follow sets;
starter packs;
people already in your graph.
Add them.
Stage 4: Prune
Remove accounts you don’t need.
You don’t have to conduct a trial.
No formal charges are required.
Nobody needs to have done anything wrong.
They just aren’t useful to your feed.
Unfollow.
Stage 5: Personalize
Eventually your graph might look nothing like the original list.
Excellent.
That means it worked.
The successful end state of the CacheRat starter list is not 1,000 people permanently following my choices.
The successful end state is:
your network.
How to Get Followers on Nostr Without Becoming Spam
Eventually the question reverses.
You’ve found people.
Now how do people find you?
There are plenty of ways to inflate a follower number while making an account worse.
I am not interested in those.
The useful objective is becoming someone that other people voluntarily decide they want to encounter again.
Make your profile understandable
You do not need a corporate biography.
You need enough information that somebody clicking your profile after seeing a useful reply can determine what they’re looking at.
A reasonable profile has:
a recognizable name or pseudonym;
an image;
a short description;
a few real interests;
some original posts.
Optionally, you can use a NIP-05 identifier.
NIP-05 maps an internet-style identifier to a Nostr public key. Importantly, the specification explicitly describes it as identification, not general identity verification, and clients ultimately follow public keys rather than the NIP-05 address itself.
Useful?
Yes.
Proof that the account owner is a saint, astronaut or Nobel Prize winner?
No.
Have something worth finding
This seems obvious.
It apparently isn’t.
Suppose you post:
GM
Then reply to thirty people hoping they inspect your profile.
They inspect it.
Your profile contains:
GM GM Good morning nostr GM Follow me GM
There is nowhere for this relationship to go.
Give people something.
Post things you actually know.
Things you’ve done.
Things you’ve built.
Things you’ve noticed.
Things you don’t understand but genuinely want to understand.
Photos.
Code.
Jokes.
Research.
Stories.
Technical failures.
Questions.
Your strange collection of 1980s radio manuals.
Whatever is actually yours.
Good replies are discovery
A worthwhile reply is probably the best non-spam way to become visible.
Not:
This.
Not:
Based.
Not:
🔥🔥🔥
Actually contribute.
Add information.
Correct something accurately.
Ask a useful question.
Tell a relevant story.
Make somebody laugh.
Expand the discussion.
A good reply does two things simultaneously:
It improves the conversation.
And it quietly gives everybody reading that conversation a sample of you.
No follower begging required.
Repetition builds recognition
People often follow after encountering the same person several times.
You see a good reply.
Then another.
Then an interesting original post.
Eventually you click.
That process is ordinary human recognition.
It is also much healthier than manufacturing thousands of low-value interactions in pursuit of a counter.
Why Follow-for-Follow Makes Your Nostr Follow List Worse
Suppose your strategy is:
Follow 5,000 people. Maybe 700 follow me back.
This might increase your follower count.
It also corrupts your primary information filter.
Your follow graph is supposed to answer:
What do I want entering my attention?
Follow-for-follow changes that question to:
Who might reward me for clicking this button?
Those are not the same problem.
Now your feed is filled according to reciprocal growth potential rather than interest.
You successfully increased a number while damaging the product.
Congratulations.
A follow-back is much more useful when it emerges naturally:
You follow someone because they’re interesting.
You encounter their work.
You sometimes contribute to conversations they’re involved in.
They encounter you repeatedly.
They inspect your profile.
They decide you’re interesting too.
They follow.
Nobody had to negotiate.
You Do Not Need to Agree With Everyone You Follow
A useful social graph is not a collection of people who reassure you.
Some of the best accounts to follow are people who:
know something you don’t;
work in fields you don’t;
reach different conclusions from similar evidence;
notice things you consistently miss;
have different experiences;
are simply funny enough to justify the bandwidth.
Agreement can be pleasant.
It isn’t the same thing as information.
Mute harassment.
Mute spam.
Mute things you genuinely don’t want to encounter.
Disagreement itself is not network corruption.
Sometimes that’s the useful part.
A Practical First Week With a Nostr Follow List
You do not need a “7-Day Nostr Growth Challenge.”
You need a working routine.
Before importing
Protect your private key.
Complete enough of your profile that a person can recognize what kind of account they’re looking at.
Back up existing follows.
Bootstrap
Import or otherwise use the starter list.
Confirm existing important follows survived.
Let your client populate.
Don’t immediately start evaluating 1,000 people based on avatars.
Read
Spend some time observing.
Which names recur?
Which conversations interest you?
Which topics are overrepresented?
Which accounts add useful information?
Which ones merely produce volume?
Explore
Open profiles.
Inspect replies.
Search interests.
Browse hashtags.
Look at who interesting people follow.
Try another client occasionally.
Different interfaces can expose different parts of the network.
Participate
Post something original.
Reply when you actually have something to say.
Ask real questions.
Follow people you discover yourself.
Do not begin farming reciprocal follows.
Curate
Unfollow irrelevant accounts.
Mute actual garbage.
Keep useful automation.
Remove useless automation.
Add newly discovered people.
Gradually turn the starter graph into your own.
There is no graduation ceremony.
One day you realize you’re no longer setting up Nostr.
You’re just using it.
Common Nostr Follow List Mistakes
Following too few accounts
A tiny sample can make the network appear much smaller and more homogeneous than it actually is.
Bootstrap enough activity to explore.
Following only famous accounts
Large accounts are useful.
They are not the entire network.
A lot of Nostr’s best conversations happen among ordinary participants who will never make anybody’s Top 100 Important Decentralized Thought Leaders list.
Thank goodness.
Importing without preserving existing follows
Kind 3 is replaceable.
Know what your tool does before publishing a bulk replacement.
Treating every bot as garbage
Judge the output.
Useful automation is useful.
Keeping follows out of politeness
A follow is an information preference, not a wedding vow.
Following people solely for follow-backs
This makes your graph worse in exchange for a larger number.
Assuming a missing account is inactive
Check relay/client behavior before concluding that nothing exists.
Treating NIP-05 as universal identity verification
It isn’t. NIP-05 maps an identifier to a pubkey; its own specification explicitly warns that it is identification rather than general verification.
Never pruning the starter list
The starter list is scaffolding.
Eventually the building should belong to you.
Nostr Follow List FAQ
What is a Nostr follow list?
A Nostr follow list is the collection of public keys representing the accounts a user follows. NIP-02 defines the basic follow list as a kind 3 event containing p tags for followed profiles.
What is NIP-02?
NIP-02 is the Nostr Implementation Possibility that defines the basic follow-list format. It describes kind 3 follow-list events and how followed public keys appear in their tags.
What is a kind 3 event on Nostr?
Kind 3 is the standard basic follow-list event defined by NIP-02. It contains the public keys of accounts being followed. Publishing a newer follow list replaces the previous one.
It is intended as a starting graph that you can inspect, import, modify and gradually replace with your own discoveries.
Can I follow 1,000 people on Nostr?
Yes. The more important question is whether following those accounts produces a feed you find useful.
There is no magic universally correct number. Start with enough people to explore the network, then prune according to your interests and the capabilities of your client.
How do I import a Nostr follow list?
The exact process depends on your client or follow-management tool.
Before importing, back up your current follows and make sure the tool merges the desired accounts with the follows you want to preserve. Because kind 3 follow lists are replaceable, blindly publishing a new list can overwrite the previous one.
Will importing a Nostr follow list delete my old follows?
It can if the import process publishes a replacement kind 3 list that does not include them.
A properly designed merge operation should preserve your existing follows, add the new ones and remove duplicates before publishing the complete list.
How do I back up my Nostr follow list?
At minimum, export or preserve the public keys you currently follow.
A plain-text file with one pubkey per line is enough to preserve the most important relationship data.
Do not confuse your public-key follow list with your private key. Your private key must remain secret.
How do I find interesting people on Nostr?
Start with an active graph, then explore replies, searches, hashtags, follow relationships, follow sets, starter packs and discovery feeds.
Pay particular attention to people you repeatedly encounter making useful contributions to conversations you already care about.
Who are the best people to follow on Nostr?
There is no universal list.
The best accounts for you are the ones that repeatedly provide information, conversation, entertainment or useful discovery around things you actually care about.
A starter list can expose the network.
Your own behavior should eventually determine the permanent graph.
What is the difference between a Nostr follow list and a starter pack?
The normal follow list is your personal kind 3 following graph under NIP-02.
NIP-51 also defines kind 39089 starter packs: named sets of profiles intended to be shared so that users can discover or follow the group together.
What is a Nostr follow set?
NIP-51 defines kind 30000 follow sets as categorized groups of users. Unlike the single standard follow list, users can maintain multiple named sets for different purposes.
What is an npub?
npub is a NIP-19 Bech32 representation of a Nostr public key designed to make keys easier to display and share. The underlying key can also be represented as hexadecimal data.
Are Nostr follow lists public?
Normal NIP-02 follow lists consist of public-key references published as Nostr events. You should generally treat your normal following relationships as public information.
Your private key is an entirely separate matter and should never be exposed.
How do I remove bots from my Nostr feed?
Unfollow automated accounts whose output you don’t want.
Mute accounts producing material you specifically want suppressed.
Don’t automatically remove an account merely because it is automated; useful bots can provide valuable information. Judge what arrives in your feed.
How do I get more followers on Nostr?
Make your profile understandable, publish material worth finding and participate in real conversations.
Useful replies are especially effective because they expose your account naturally to people already interested in the same discussion.
Avoid follow-for-follow farming. It can increase the counter while degrading your own follow graph.
Should I follow everybody who follows me?
No.
A follow tells your client that you want that account participating in your information stream.
Following someone solely because they followed you turns your feed into a reciprocity ledger instead of a useful network.
Start With a Better Nostr Follow List
You can build the first thousand yourself.
Start finding established accounts.
Inspect their follows.
Search topics.
Browse conversations.
Remove obvious porn.
Throw away spam.
Separate useful automation from garbage automation.
Spend enough time on Nostr and the place starts developing recurring characters. Not specific people. Types. You begin recognizing them before you recognize the account. The Bitcoin guy with the orange avatar. The protocol developer who hasn’t slept since NIP-19. The privacy person who considers your browser choice a moral failure. The old internet guy…
A good Nostr follow list gives a new account enough people to actually see the network. This guide explains how Nostr follows work, how to import and back them up safely, how to avoid bots and spam, how to find worthwhile people, and how to turn a 1,000-account starter list into a network that is…
The internet archaeologist does not wear a little Indiana Jones hat. Usually. Mostly he sits in front of a computer looking at something named: manual_final2_REVISED_old.zip And wondering what chain of human suffering produced it. His job is looking for the old internet. Not the current internet. The current internet is very easy to find. It…
