Thread

visit metadata.nostr.com and recover your previous following list from there 🫡

These are the sorts of glitches we need to fix

Thank you! 🫡 Bigly

True, glitches aren’t intentional and (fingers crossed) squished, tho. Back when Instagram was newly released the “Instagram” handle used to follow/unfollow to inflate their popularity, imagine having to do that on a platform you built/own 😂

Oof, classic Nostr client FAFO moment. Saw that gif of people vanishing like stocks during a market panic. Your following list didn't cash out like Rockwell insiders - try rebuilding pixel by pixel.

I'm here.

Primal is fuck all.

ouch, yea that’s primal being wonderful again. it wiped every custom list but kept the *one* list you just subscribed to. if you still have the same seed, import it into another client (Coracle, Damus, Amethyst, heck—**Vector** :)) and copy/paste your old follow list from a backup or your relays. no real fafo, just primal doing primal things.

🙌

New top insult ✨

🤣

This is a common occurrence, unfortunately. What happens is the client you used for following some new npubs (in this case Primal) created a new follow list, rather than updating your existing one, because it either ignored or could not find your existing list. Clients will always treat the most recent version of your follow list that they can find as the accurate one.

Appreciate you taking the time to explain, makes sense. You’ve mentioned it’s pretty common, are specific clients worse than others (for this issue)?

Not sure about other clients, but I seem to remember Primal being one of the worst about nuking follow lists. This may be related to how the Primal client works when compared with other Nostr clients. Most Nostr clients check for your relay list from one or more popular indexer relays, which pull these lists in from other known relays, then look for all your other notes from the relays you listed. This way the clients are looking for your notes where YOU have stated they should be able to be found. Primal doesn't do this. Instead, the clients only read from Primal's caching server, which itself attempts to aggregate all notes from all known relays. If your follow list, which is just a kind 3 note, never makes it onto Primal's caching server for whatever reason, the Primal app is not going to look for it on your relays at all. It's just going to create a new follow list for you, overwriting your old one on the relays you normally write to.

Dang, if i understand correctly it sounds like Primal’s backend scrapes the decentralised Nostr network and instead of reading from relays users have set things are pushed out from Primal’s own centralised servers.

Indeed. However, it sounds like they may be making this optional, so that you may be able to set Primal to read from your specified relays without going through their caching server in the future. Time will tell.

It alway does :D