I used to spend much of my free time obsessed with theoretical physics.
At some point, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, my obsession switched to freedom tech.
I’m hoping one day to shift my focus back to physics. In some sense, my desire to figure out decentralized WoT is motivated in part by a desire to answer the deeper questions. To do that, we need to replace the legacy peer review process with something better.
I thought about taking TeXstr in that direction, using WoT as a decentralized peer-review mechanism and Atomic Signature Swaps to offer bounties to reputable people to review your work. I could for example lock 10k usd that only Ed Witten could claim in exchange for his signature to an event announcing the work has merit. He could filter what he reviews by value and stop reading as soon as he realizes it won't deserve his social signal, cutting his losses in time investment really quickly. He has an even greater incentive to stay honest, as his reputation and future earning (inside and outside of nostr) is worth much more than any single bounty.
I believe we will eventually have the tools to use methods exactly as you describe over nostr, as well as other methods along similar lines. But a lot of infrastructure needs to be built first.
For starters: I will want my Grapevine (my WoT) to tell me that npub_ew, which claims to be Ed Witten, is in fact the real Ed Witten and not some bot impersonator.
Next, I will want my Grapevine to give me a list of npubs who are trusted in any given context, with the context in this case being “to review papers in theoretical physics” or something along those lines.
But then the question arises: who curates the lists of contexts? Who decides that the category: ToE should a subcategory of physics? The answer needs to be: my Grapevine. Because I sure as hell don’t want the World Wide Web Consortium or any other centralized body to be in charge of defining contexts for me.
This is why I am building Brainstorm, a personized WoT nostr relay and knowledge graph curated with the assistance of your Grapevine. Coming along slowly but surely! 😊
Great to hear you are working on this problem! I think these problem will get a lot easier with just more data. You can check nostr:npub176p7sup477k5738qhxx0hk2n0cty2k5je5uvalzvkvwmw4tltmeqw7vgup's https://vertexlab.io/ it works amazingly well for finding real people who have a decent amount of connections. With more data, algorithms will be able to figure thinks out pretty reliably just doing some kind of "unsupervised learning".
I’m a fan of pip’s work and glad to see him demonstrating the power of PageRank to the nostr community. One easy and useful method to calculate one’s WoT is the “my follows + their follows” method, but that method has some obvious shortcomings, and personalized PageRank is the obvious next step.
The most straightforward way to implement PageRank is to base it off of follows. However, it’s not immediately obvious how to incorporate signals other than follows (mutes, reports, interactions, etc) or how to calculate contextual scores. GrapeRank is my attempt at modification of PageRank into a more sophisticated and versatile centrality algorithm that can address those questions.
Where can I learn more about it? Is it open source?
Yes to open source - check out the link in my bio (straycat.brainstorm.social) to see an older version of Brainstorm and a link to the github repo. A lot of features are live, including a table with PageRank and GrapeRank scores for about 350k pubkeys and lists of reported users that are curated by your Grapevine. Imagine using tags instead of reports, and we’re getting close to genuinely decentralized curation of any arbitrary list. The main issue I’m working on right now is how to keep the neo4j graph database current without running into memory issues and crashing of the graph db. (Gotta hate java!! 🤦🏻♂️ 😝) So I don’t recommend spinning up your own Brainstorm yet. But hopefully soon!!!
