I'm sensitive to these kinds of "human-scale" approaches (maybe you remember https://catallax.network which maximizes no-tech human trust rather than fancy escrow contacts).
But in this case, you would need a relay (or more, if you want different opinions) for every _thing_ someone might care about. that seems way less feasible than simply communicating the same concept through attestation events over nostr.
No, we don't need a relay for every thing (and every combination of two or more things), just like we don't have a website today with a community for every thing, but we have some because someone did them and they succeeded, while others were never tried and others failed, and we're still ok.
I think having Nostr and the universal relay as a standard makes it much easier for more of these niche relays to exist, so we'll end up with a lot more stuff.
Again, I'm not saying the WoT approach shouldn't exist, it definitely should, and both approaches can be combined. I'm just saying we shouldn't decide on that being the only solution, because it's quite complicated and we can't be sure it will scale across the vast spaces of humanity and relationships (and computer resources for downloading and processing all the data).
Yea that's all very fair and I mostly agree.
You had me at "centralized indexers are a mirage".
That said... one quibble: I'm not concerned about the computational resource point. People demonstrably pay for and self-host millions of hashes worth of monetary network compute cycles.
Once properly decentralized and subjective trust systems begin to prove their importance as one of the only viable ways to manage and scale human relationships/society in the context of complex, distributed networks, I can imagine that people will be willing to shell out a few watts and bytes to run such infrastructure.
Once it becomes clear your options are: What I just described; "manual, hand-curated trust"; or MEGACORP ALGO, I think the right people will come around at the right time ;)
One of the challenges I’m encountering in building Brainstorm personalized WoT relays is that it’s resource-intensive and kinda expensive (at least until I figure out some optimizations). But if you run your own Brainstorm, it will be relatively easy to calculate and provide personalized PageRank scores on demand to users who don’t have their own Brainstorm. Slightly more computation and you can provide users with personalized GrapeRank scores too. Charge a few sats for the service and you have a business model.
ding ding ding
the market for (cashu...) nanopayments on spare CPU/GPU is only going to get wilder. ride the wave
