I’m currently working on adding something I’m calling “channels,” the first real application of DCoSL. With channels you’ll be able to select a topic you’re interested in — bitcoin, nostr, politics, carnivore, cat videos, whatever — and your content feed will be from a list of users who deliver high quality content on that topic, as determined by your web of trust. If you don’t see the topic you want, you can create a new one!

It’s currently available on my desktop app:

GitHub.com/wds4/pretty-good

You can run it in dev mode if you’re comfy with that. There’s an alpha release which ought to work although I can’t guarantee you won’t run into bugs. If you do, let me know and I’ll see if I can fix them! 😊

I have a tool in Pretty Good Apps that can help with relay selection. It looks through your follow list, makes a list of all the relays they use, and ranks relays according to how many of your follows use that relay.

Still in alpha. But I’m curious whether any other clients do this, or whether anyone would find a tool like this useful. If so I could do some bug fixes / clean up the UX a bit perhaps.

Just pushed changes.

That rabbit hole gets deep into human psychology. The psychology of tribalism. Tribal narratives. Narrative fiction. Why toxicity exists within tribal narratives. What are the characteristics, so we can learn to recognize it.

The central role of cognitive work in a tribal narrative. Yes, proof of work.

Would you believe me if I told you that this rabbit hole, way deep underground, connects in a major way to DCoSL?

The computational work required to maintain the concept graph will become nontrivial, once the protocol is developed in its entirety. Much of the structure of the concept graph will have to be designed with the goal of optimizing that workload.

I could type more here but it’s a huge topic. I’m gradually trying to add it to the dcosl repo.

I do carnivore. Avoid seed oils. Share lots of beliefs with with maxis tribe. Steel, sun, stack sats, etc. Including the deep, well-deserved mistrust of so much of conventional wisdom.

But I also frequently ask myself: are any of those beliefs just the product of tribalism from another tribe? In other words: are those beliefs objectively true? Are seed oils and carbs truly the root of all evil, just to use one example?

And most importantly: How would I know? Which is a whole new rabbit hole of its own! 🐇

WHERE??!!??? 😜😂

☝🏻👍🏻

Which is precisely why I bitcoin. And nostr. And dcosl!

The willingness and the ability to separate the signal (e.g. those truths that are currently championed almost exclusively by maxis) from the noise (the tribal beliefs that frequently accompany) is one of the hallmarks of a mind that is NOT encumbered by tribalism. Conversely: the rejection of an idea bc you don’t like the messenger or the messenger’s tribe (Trump derangement syndrome, name-your-poison derangement syndrome) is one of the hallmarks of tribalism.

If you seek truth, you must accept that the message ultimately is independent of, and more important than, the messenger.

But if your need to belong (an understandable need, to be sure!) is more vital than your search for truth … it’s the other way around: agree with the messenger if it’s your tribe, and truth doesn’t matter. (Heck, comfort yourself the the thought that “objective reality dOeSnTrEaLlYeXiSt” or “everything is a social construct” or whatevs 🤪)

The psychological tendency towards tribalism is something that bitcoin, in and of itself, does not fix!

(Caveat: the reason we need tribes is to give us frens to protect us. And bitcoin is theoretically something you can protect all by yourself. But even in theory, we’re still light years away from obviating the psychological need for tribes.)

I wonder if it could edit the follows page with the features we were just discussing. Give it the existing code and say “add this feature.” I’m thinking not but … maybe?

Can I ask it to build DCoSL for me? 😂

Like the normal follows page, plus a toggle button to hide all of her follows who are already on your follow list? Would be a simple enough feature to add.

Or a “compare follow lists” button that opens up a panel with that option plus a few others, like show who you’re following but Alice isn’t, or show who you’re both following.

Did I see one of the clients is creating a filter that allows you to block everyone in your follows mute lists + their follows mute lists too? I think I did but can’t recall which client

The app is still basically in the alpha stage, but it exists now as a proof of concept. I’m not aware of any of method to curate a list like that without its being centralized in some fashion.

I just added it as the ninth list in the Curated Lists section of Pretty Good

Imagine a genuinely decentralized method for curation, by YOUR web of trust, of a list called “Users Who Are Not Bots”

Anyone have any use for a list like that?

https://github.com/wds4/DCoSL

https://github.com/wds4/pretty-good