I believe the simplest and most effective single solution beyond WoT is proof of membership in a trusted community.
Discussion
Yup, #communikeys integrate best with this.
They can ask for payment (to write) most easily (alleviating the need to filter with social graphs).
They can follow / label the npubs they interact with (as a high signal profile in the social graph).
But mostly, they are king over their own community and their whole value-add = moderation (filtering for high signal content, profiles, ...).
Entering via a community you "trust" is immediately having a reference base. F.e. Anyone with the same name, image etc as someone in the communities you're in → can be labeled as a potential scammer. Etc...
It's an interesting option.
But, also communities can be built in an entirely synthetic way, so if you want to use them as a proxy to prove that a user is real, you should also verify that they are legitimate. And so we go back to WoT.
Yup, we're building on community / private group invites as the main entry point. For that and many other reasons.
yes exactly, but the community already exists in the social graph. 99% of people will be invited to communities, won't be their founders. Founders will need to acquire reputation themselves, but these are the type of people that aren't afraid of doing the work.
Make sense, the founder improves his own WoT, the community mirror it and so the members benefit from it.
But the community have to be closed with strong gates, like invitation-only, payment, or very heavy PoW.
And it's not easy to verify these conditions in a programmatic way.
Let's see how things evolve.
I see this evolve towards #communikeys labeling their active members in an open way. So that the apps they use can easily pull that data.