So I'm coming across this talk of a "Web of Trust".
What's the purpose of this? Is there a problem that gets solved by this? Filtering out spam in one's replies?
I can't quite tell whether it's more like a pubkey-relative follow distance concept, or more of an absolute popularity score.
Wanting to be contacted only by people who have a certain degree of "social separation" sounds like a choice someone might want to make. It's not, however, clear why this would lead to higher-quality interactions or a better experience. It's not like the friends of my friends are more interesting people than others. But I guess this should just be a decision that each user can make for themselves.
If it's more like a popularity score, it's of course legitimate to aggregate and disseminate information about what pubkeys have a lot of followers, which ones are muted, etc. But using such information to filter or prioritize whose notes one sees in one's client is another matter. You could argue that it improves the content you see, but you could equally well argue that it degrades it. It seems unfortunate if use of such scoring became a default on nostr, rather than each individual user's deliberate choice.
Maybe there's a simple technical issues that require a "Web of Trust" that I'm not attuned to. Not sure.
#wot #asknostr