I did a little bit of work on a web of trust system called "web of distrust" which identified people who you or your friends have muted or blocked
Discussion
Implemented?
I might be able to use a similar system to only show reviews by friends of friends of friends, or something like that
I think something like that is a good place to start.
The main issue is that following or friending someone != trusting someone. Especially when trust is contextual: maybe I trust you to rate movies but not fashion. So perhaps the next step requires the ability to attest: “I trust
I'm not sure how to make an interface for that where people would actually use it. I can't imagine going through my friends list and adding a checklist of categories in which I trust them. And I can't imagine anyone would do anything but x out of such a checklist if I displayed it whenever you "follow" someone. So I don't think a checklist of trust categories would actually get used
Figuring out how to make this usable is def a challenge, but it’s one that we desperately need to figure out, at least in my opinion. The value added would be tremendous once it’s all in place.
Shifting from scraped data (which is based on the oftentimes false assumption that follows = trust) to explicit trust claims is one of the humps we need to get over. The question is: how exactly do we do that?
Perhaps for starters: for a marketplace, make a hierarchical list of product categories. Since it’s hierarchical, instead of rating all your contacts in a super granular fashion, which would take forever, you could use large categories. Probably for starters, Alice would say she trusts Bob in “all categories”. She might even just want to port her entire follows list, saying she trusts all her follows for all categories. Of course the point is that that’s not always true, so the next thing she can do is edit the trust ratings, in as granular a fashion as she desires.
To address your point of x’ing out of the checklist: display an option at some point where the user ports the entire follows list into a “trust in all things” list. Make it easy and painless. That’s just to jumpstart the system. When Alice later realizes she doesn’t actually trust Bob in category X, that’s when she discovers she can provide an updated attestation to that effect.
btw I took a quick look at anigma.io and I was wondering how channels work? Are new channels stored as nostr events? If yes, what kind are you using?