If you want the actual low-level details I must say that after reading and watching the same explanations 30 times over a period of 2 years at least, spaced out, and reading the BOLTs in random order, not paying much attention, without understanding anything, a dozens times, you will understand. If you know how Bitcoin transactions work in the first place.
There is another idea here that could be harnessed for this purpose: follow recommendations.
Instead of saying "follow this person" and linking to their profile one can send a special kind or tag that tells the client to render a button the user can click to follow that person.
Clients may cache these recommendations and show them in a sidebar, like Twitter does. Crowdsourced follow recommendations.
https://minds.com/ proposed NIP-26 because they didn't want to have full control over users' keys, but I am still confused about what exactly they wanted to do with that.
I was thinking about a process through which a hosted key slowly signals that it is in fact an "adopted child" of some parent key created elsewhere, then readers can slowly migrate to following that other key. This could be done with NIP-26 but that is not necessary even, there could be just a pointer and a hint. Is there a problem with this?
I see. That was the initial design of NIP-26 before we switched to having different keys for backwards-compatibility. But your point makes sense. We might be able to come up with a magic cryptography trick that does that.
It would break backwards-compatibility, but, well, NIP-26, the way it is being pushed, also breaks backwards-compatibility, so we might as well do something better than NIP-26 for the purposes.
I think NIP-26 is a bad idea that will eventually destroy Nostr and that you NIP-26 enthusiasts are not thinking correctly and you should stop a little. Should I still merge your PR?
It's a very inelegant solution that adds a lot of complexity. It wasn't conceived with the goal of safeguarding people's keys at all. If it was done with that in mind I bet we could have made something better.
In any case, rushing into it feels misguided. For the sole purpose of keeping identities safe I believe NIP-41 is a superior solution, although not perfect either, of course.