Web of distrust

Web of distrust is a concept for identifying who can be trusted in a user’s Nostr social graph. A follow (kind 3) event is considered a direct indication of trust. Trust is transitive in theory, so if A trusts B and B trusts C, it is implied that A trusts C. For the sake of simplicity, we will only consider one degree of transitivity in constructing the set of trusted users.

Distrust is represented by negative reputation (report and mute) events. User A’s implicit trust for C is overidden if A has explicitly expressed distrust of C. Implicit distrust exists in the case where A trusts D who distrusts C. A implicitly trusts for C through direct trust for B, while also implicitly distrusting C through direct trust for D. User A will calculate a trust percentage score for C as follows: (count of A’s follows who follow C) / ((count of A’s follows who follow C) + (count of A’s follows who distrust C))