How do you see the UX around these "endorsements" for all these separate things? As in, do see a way to avoid having that as an extra action, and thus friction, users have to perform?
Discussion
Right now I’m thinking that I need to write up a roadmap for how you as a developer can incorporate the Grapevine into your app or platform, and it needs to be broken down into steps:
Step one will be to use the follows list to create a WoT score, something that is already done by wikifreedia and a few other apps.
Step two will be to allow users to create trust attestations formatted according to the Grapevine protocol and in a context that is relevant to the app in question. Context has an action dimension and a category dimension. For example: “Alice endorses Bob to curate wikifreedia content (the action) for all topics (the category).” At this step, only one context will be utilized for the app. This is an extra action and will cause some friction as you mention, but users can ignore it if they don’t want to use it, or wait until they have a good reason to play with it, which might not be until we build out a few more steps.
Step 3 will be to pool together all available attestations data with the follows data for calculation of the WoT score.
Step 4 will be to replace the WoT score with the Influence Score, calculated according to the Grapevine protocol, basically the same way it’s already done using my proof of concept. That will be a lot of work for the developer but the user experience doesn’t have to take a hit because it’s all under the hood.
Step 5 will be to phase out follows data and use only attestations from step 2. There could be a user setting whether to use one or both sources of data, or perhaps it can be managed automatically depending on how much attestation data is available.
Step 6 will be to expand the available contexts by creating new categories. For example: “Alice endorses Bob to curate wikifreedia content in the category of technology (versus sports or entertainment or whatever).” The categories will be defined by the dev team at this point, but contributed by users and curated by the Grapevine in future steps, which will include arranging them into hierarchies.
I could go on. But I’m wondering whether steps 1-4 might work as the foundation of a hackathon.
I should add another step: your Grapevine will make a list of known users, calculate the Influence Score for all users for all contexts, store the data in a .csv or some suitable format which will be part of the Grapevine protocol, and stored as a nostr note. It can be encrypted if desired. The purpose will be to improve performance, since calculating influence scores from scratch will be slow, once the number of users gets large enough.