Users

Follow and unfollow

You can follow and unfollow users from their profile view menu, from each note's menu or by visiting following/follower lists.

Follow / unfollow from the user profile

Follow / unfollow from a note

Follow all

Follower count

The follower count is constructed from your social network's following lists. Iris gathers the data from relays and counts who is following you. There is no single "follower count" as in traditional centralised social media.

The follower count may vary between clients and sessions for this reason. Some relays may be offline or not accessible and therefore the current follower count reflects this. It does not necessarily mean that someone has unfollowed you.

Following list

Your entire contact (following) list is updated every time you follow or unfollow someone.

Nostr doesn't save individual follows as events, only the most recent version of your contact list. Keeping more than one nostr client session open (not logged out) is not advised since this may reset your following list if an older or incomplete list is retrieved from the network by your latest active client.

It's recommended to take frequent backups of your profile (and following list). You cannot back up your follower list since that is counted by the client and is not stored anywhere (nostr protocol does not have a concept for a follower list).

Brave browser issue: Spotify embed may cause Brave to ask to install a Widevine DRM extension.

Unknown users

If a user's name is not found, a deterministic Adjective Animal name is shown instead of the public key (e.g. Tall Marsupial).

Adjective Animal names on users

Color badges on usernames

• Blue = a followed user
• White = you don't follow but 1-10 of your following follows the user (hover over the icon and Iris shows the count)
• Yellow = you don't follow but over 10 of your following follows the user (hover over the icon and Iris shows the count)

Likes

Click the number next to the heart in a note to see who liked it. On a browser, you can also hover over the icon to see the name of the user.

Note reaction counts

Block

User blocks are private (they are encrypted and stored as a nostr event kind 16462).

When you block someone on Iris, DMs will be locally removed as well, and any further DMs are rejected. If you followed the user before blocking the block also unfollows the user. If you want to unblock you need to follow the user again. Unblocking does not restore the previous follow status.

You can mute a note (and its thread) if you don't want to block the user.

Block/unblock user from profile

Block user from note