I think, Social Trust online needs a structured, decentralized scoring system. It needs to be done by each person so we can build communities of people like ourselves and find what can help us achieve our aspirations. We work better when we work together AND while maintain idividuality. These could be in conflict, but perhaps they don't have to be. Beause as we change, so does our associations and goals, but not our core indiviual principals. Some of our bonds last a lifetime, some bonds are broken. Without bonds we are adrift and with too many we are constrained.

Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets

Social influence tactics date back centuries, but modern psychological operations (PsyOps) took shape during World War II and the Cold War. Governments employed propaganda leaflets, radio broadcasts and media campaigns to shape enemy morale and public opinion. By the 2000s, these tools became widely spread and avaialble to all with the internet. Social media built upon this and "Influencers" have never been such and accurate term for popular people swaying opinion and changing our habits. Decentralizing PsyOps from state actors and private firms to arget consumer behavior, to millions of Influencers and creators all tryig to gain audience for gain. Sometimes, people acted collectivley to push back against bad faith actors, but with so may people all acting in a Influencer / Creator grab for attention we are constantly innundated with making choices about trust. As our massive structures of order try to grapple with such a massive societal change, at first they move slow and then take drastic actions. In seeking to protect the "most vulnerable" to these influnces, large and vocal organizations want to increase rules and restrictions. Another from of not reasoning our way through a new challenge we created. In revisiting some of our shared path we feel a need to reurn to older methods to regain control. To stop myself from wildly expounding into a multitude of directions and topics, let's reign it back into this new evolution.

The ATProtocol (AT://) and the compostable moderation tools that have been afforded every individual. But also allow for collective action while remaining and indivual, finding a tribe but leaving rancid vibes.

With the many tools, they can both be useful and detrimental. It's really a matter of application. We can also form "norms" about how to use them or rebel in protest. They can all be forms of feedback that the reciever and giver can have their own interpretations. Look at a few, and since I can only speak to my experiance I'll point out my complicated relationship with "Likes"

Likes seem obvious at first, but since Social media platforms implemented "Like" the ways in which people use them and place meaning has grown. In a system it's just a on/off flag, but it's grown to mean so much more.

I liked getting likes, but then being beholden to all the requirements for people seeing my post and liking it were beyond my grasp of all the rules and nuance and feeling, that each individual places on that action is almost impossible for a person to reconcile. It weighed on me heavliy, compounded by all the "norms" of social media. But I know all too well how to destroy myself and I needed to find a way forward for myself without getting people I enjoyed interacting with annoyed at a new abnormal behavior. What did I do?

This laid the foundation for another experiment, H2 2024 was an exceptionaly dark time. Things were already bad and just getting worse. I started an alt with the intention to OVER editorialize my mutuals experience. Block anyone that follows that I hadn't ever interacted with using my main account. In a severe slap of Karma, my Income was eradicated. Oh they aren't related but the timing and context is important. It's very easy to stick to a path of pain when that's all you know. But as I was working on so many things, this experiment demanded too much .... spite? severity of being stuck in my own well of sadness and inflicting it on others? That takes A LOT of energy. I relented after 4 months and stopped blocking people as long as they were followed by one of my mutuals. Well that opened up a new path.

Hopefully most people are familiar with the Six Degress of Kevin Bacon. By putting some faith in moots, and faith they have put in others. That really became my starting point for why can't this work? a Social Trust. I had written some other things and kicked around some other ideas but this one kinda stuck. However it needed some conversation, and That dear reader, it how i'm finally getting to my ask and pitch. I'm asking for your input and time, two incredibly valuebale resources, and asking for that always seems like and imposition. But if I don't, ask and look for people to do it with then I am alone with an idea and unsure how to create.

The first couple of levels for developing social trust are around some bluesky the social app* things :

Positive : Follows, User Lists, Likes

Negative : Label, Moderaton List, Unfollow, Block

Most social media users lack training in influence tactics, so they rely on everyday cues—likes, follower counts, badges and platform recommendations—to judge trustworthiness. These native tools serve as proxies for authority and popularity but also introduce biases. Users fall prey to echo chambers, hype cycles and viral misinformation when they don’t see the hidden hand of coordinated influence operations.

—a “trust lexicon”—to move beyond surface-level signals like likes and follows. By embedding trust scores into AT Protocol accounts, communities could gain better tools for

spam resistance, moderation, and reputation portability

Imagine each AT Protocol account maintaining a dynamic trust score for every other account it encounters. Starting at zero, interactions and third-party endorsements gradually increase that score toward 1.0, while unfollows instantly halve it and blocks reset it to zero. This decentralized trust ledger—stored in each user’s DID record—powers more nuanced content ranking, spam filtration and community governance.

Main points:

  • Trust score lifecycle: initiation at 0, incremental rises, fast penalties

  • Interaction weights: recency, mutual follows, labeler endorsements

  • Unfollow penalty: score Ă· 2

  • Block penalty: reset score to 0

  • User-controlled thresholds for content filtering and discovery

  • Potential for cross-instance trust aggregation and portable reputations

  • No negative score: Embraces "block and move on" mindset of not giveing anymore of your time, attention, or thought

Potential Path(s)

  • Tool that runs against your PDS and establishes Trust Score for All the Accounts you follow (like a Skircle)

  • Partnership with Cred.Blue? It's already established and this builds on several foundations it set.

  • Shows you results before you commit to PDS

  • Flags a follow up in 3 months to confirm rating is same or revaluate who you follow

    • All accounts you stopped following in last 3 months pops up proposes cutting score in half and sets a 3 month window to reset to 0

Concerns

  • Within a decentralized network, there runs the risk of large swaths of accounts that could rank others up. Would be dependant upon moderation tools to exclude those accounts from score. This would not work well for accounts that follow alot of accounts as they are easily suceptible to data being skewed

References

Draft 0