So if Iām following correctly: if we wanted to have a system where Alice maintains a list of users whom she explicitly endorses as curators of a mute list, she could maintain a list of their mute lists. Although thereās currently no standard method in the protocol to communicate āI endorse these lists.ā She could put it in the name of her list, and perhaps some naming convention could emerge thatās not in the protocol, although hard to imagine that catching on, and might not be the best way to go about it.
ahh I had not known about a tags. Ty!
day after tomorrow is what Iām focused on
A fully decentralized solution is definitely possible. And desirable. Not just the App Store, but all sorts of questions and decisions. Many of them, including the App Store, boil down to the tools that we use to communicate with each other: what are those tools and more importantly who is in charge of deciding how they work.
The question is not whether we want moderation and curation, yes or no. Bc the answer to that question is yes. The real question is who decides, and how does the moderation and curation take place. Saying it should be done in a decentralized fashion does not equal letās have zero moderation or curation, although it understandably might seem that way without having a clear vision of how it is even possible, or without even believing that it is possible.
But it is possible. Consider the English language, a tool for communication in the analog world. Whoās in charge of deciding what words mean what? Answer: nobody is in charge. No centralized bodies at all. And yet we ā seemingly magically ā somehow manage to agree to call a pencil a pencil. No committees, no standards bodies, yet we agree on most of these tools of communication. That is an example of loose consensus, in the non-digital world.
In the digital world, I think loose consensus is very much possible. We just havenāt implemented it yet. What would happen to the English language if websters dictionary shut down, and no one took their place? Basically nothing. Old words would still work, new ones would still churn into existence. But what would happen if the w3c stopped issuing standards, and no one took their place? Chaos, relatively speaking. No one would be able to agree on new standards for anything. Just like the cartoon, every attempt at fixing the problem of ātoo many standardsā would just mean adding one more standard to the pile. Without centralized standards bodies, it would be a digital Tower of Babel.
But the thing is, I think loose consensus is actually not that complex to implement digitally. Itās just that we havenāt done it yet. š¤·š»āāļø
Yup, nostrapp.link has what, 20? Although it does seem to be growing fast!
As long as the voting system isnāt in the protocol, then the App Store is just another app and people use it if they like it or make their own if they donāt. At some point though, apps that some would consider controversial will pop up and so it would be nice to have a WoT solution figured out before that happens. Which is a nontrivial problem.
Do you envision one main App Store? Or different ones run by different communities?
And there is a way! Itās called loose consensus.
There needs to be a way to do this without forming a Central Committee.
So the people who get to vote have an influence score of 1, and everyone else has an influence score of 0.
Who picks the trusted community members?
Itās only dystopian if itās centralized.
Who gets to be in charge of the vote? And who decides how many months old? This needs to be done in a decentralized manner. Which means no one should be in charge.
Principle 1: every user sees a different App Store. There is no single App Store.
Principle 2: users choose explicitly who gets to curate their App Store. No more scraping from the follows list.
Every user has the ability to endorse or reject apps.
Every user also has the ability to endorse other users as curators of the App Store. The vast majority of users will want to farm this out to a small handful of devs and others who stay on top of the latest apps.
Use a PageRank-style algorithm to calculate weight for each user to determine how much influence that user has on the list of recommended apps that you see.
Actually that wouldnāt work, because the event id changes every time Alice updates her list. If Dan wants to make a list of nip-51 lists, each item on his list would itself be a list and would need to specify:
- pubkey of that itemās list author
- the list kind
- the list d-tag (if kind=30000 or 30001; not needed if kind=10000 or 10001)
Then the client would look for the most recent event that fits that criterion.
So Danās list would be: kind 30000. What would be the d-tag of Danās list? How does he specify the d-tag of Aliceās list (and Bobās, etc.)
(Could be Iām just staring past the solution bc itās late and I need š“! Lol )
You mean: Alice, Bob and Charlie each make a list using nip-51 (either 30000 or 30001), and then Dan makes a kind 30001 list referencing each of those 3 events?
Honestly I think using the follows list to scrape together a composite mute list would be pretty powerful, shortcomings that weāve talked about notwithstanding. It should be simple enough to implement I would think. I wouldnāt be opposed to doing that and simultaneously opening up discussion for using 30002 as a next step in the progression.
I wouldnāt be surprised if relays are manually curating mute lists and using event reports to help them.
Centralized manual curation of something that yearns for decentralized curation. A losing proposition. Like in the last season of Halt and Catch Fire (they were trying to curate the web manually, pre-Google.)