Nostr

My vision of web of trust is that it’s not enough for WoT to curate content, facts and information. WoT must simultaneously curate the very digital languages we use to communicate about those things. The reason WoT has never lived up to expectations is that we have never even really tried to do that. But it can definitely be done. Just gonna take some work.

Here’s a recent post of mine describing a bit about how I envision web of trust to find the users and content we’re looking for without getting distracted by the cult of the social media “influencer”.

https://prettygoodproject.substack.com/p/the-pretty-good-way-to-calculate

Daniel Wigton 1y ago

Interesting. Sorry for the delayed response I am only here on Sundays for a bit. But your ideas strike a chord with me. I am convinced that web of trust is the only final solution to scaling and filtering. The problem comes in initializing a web of trust that piggybacks on the in person web of trust that we all use to navigate society offline.

Our brains map trust and certainty across a functionally infinite series of scopes. I trust my father, a physician, with medical advice, but not technological, even then there are shades of certainty depending on subtopic.

I don't think we can build a successful web of trust absent the stakes of broken trust that we encounter in every day life. The backbone of the network needs to be real relationships with real people. Aliases and anonymity must be the exception that is enabled by the general rule. A web of trust needs to be used in common with day to day activities to be built with values of certainty that approximate useful weights.

The same web should underlie employee, student, and patient records, payment processing, communications, social contracts and obligations voting etc.

I like nostr because it flirts with some of the right ideas to make this possible, it is just a bit simplistic. I have been building my own thing, but as a stay at home dad, time is very limited and progress is slow. I see all the right ideas already floating around but they are never pulled together into a cohesive product.

If I sound like someone you wouldn't mind on your discord I'd be happy to join.

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Discussion

david 1y ago

I think you’re absolutely correct about piggybacking on the WoT that we use offline. The way I see it, the basic methodology of real life WoT should be transferred into the digital realm as a protocol, and that’s what the tapestry protocol is designed to do. The difference is that our brains are limited to Dunbar’s number, about 150. More than that and we can’t keep track of all of the interpersonal relationships. But digital tools don’t have that problem. So imagine scaling from 150 to 8 billion. That’s what we’re going to do!

david 1y ago

In fact, I think the tapestry method is something that our brains are already basically using. I discuss that idea in this half hour presentation:

https://eegatlas-online.com/index.php/en/dweb-overview-video

Daniel Wigton 1y ago

We scale via institutions. As a Catholic I am not more than 3 steps to the Pope and 5-6 to any other Catholic in the world. The trick is creating software and tools that strengthen our existing governments and institutions while not being controlled by them. p2p networks tend to have a strong anti-institutional flavor that is well-motivated but unworkable. Our institutions, as corrupt as they are, do provide a framework for trust beyond the tribal scale. I'd be delighted to be able to create my own private key, but then be able to pop down to the courthouse to get my public key signed so I could vote, and pay taxes automatically but with software the people created and as such doesn't spy on me.

david 1y ago

“with software the people created and as such doesn't spy on me”

💯 %

This is why the WoT needs to curate our software. Open source is better than proprietary, but open source tools are stewarded: GitHub repos have managers, internet standards are managed by committees, etc. Those managers, committees, etc may be well meaning, but are too sluggish. And sometimes they can be captured. WoT can curate our digital tools in a purely decentralized fashion, just like written and spoken languages. No stewards. No single points of failure.