I tried different indexer relays and everything and the problem persisted until I got the latest Amethyst update and suddenly it's not an issue anymore.

I wouldnt recommend amethyst to normies, its for power users and its great for the geeks like me who like it raw. For normies wisp seems much more sensible to start with.

I am not tech ignorant by any means but having to do all of my own app configuration does not make me want to use any of this more than LSM.

Should have said that it wasn't aimed just at Amethyst, sry. I just picked out Vitor's comment because my immediate normie thought would be "wait, what?" which also goes for some of the other comments. I would even bet that there is some active nostr users who would raise an eyebrow and tbh I sometimes still struggle with relays myself. There is just way too many different kinds and things like indexers or search relays SHOULD be setup by default. There is very few clients that work WELL "straight out of the box" without the user having to spend time on tinkering and on many clients the initial experience is simply not great. They don't know anything about "follow packs", DVMs, relays etc etc. They also may not have contacts on nostr so their feed (initially) isn't great either. Add 1-2 mysterious following/profile wipes and "content" from certain individuals and chances are that person wont stick around for long. Why should they? It's annoying, time consuming and requires a lot of effort. Very few people will do that.

that's great!

I ended up switching to Ditto for about a week until the Amethyst update hit the Play Store beta track because it got to the point where about 2/3 of my follows were faceless random npubs and I had no idea who was posting what which made the app sort of unusable for a while.

I sometimes get that too on various apps but it seems to be happen mostly when I'm on mobile data. I found that sometimes refreshing the cache when connected to wifi fixes this (for some time).