Trust is a function. It is more than just a feeling. In a world of infinite noise,
the only signal that matters is the one you verify. We are here to map the graph,
order the protocol, and build the immune system for the decentralized web.
Welcome to the signal processing layer.
This is Say What?
Welcome to the very first episode of Say What?
For the last decade, we've been trapped in black boxes fed by algorithms optimized for addiction.
We know the current model is broken, but the exit won't be to a new app or a new platform.
That will be recreating the same problems of gatekeepers and high priests in a different venue.
The exit will be to a new primitive on an open protocol.
It is the web of trust on NOSTA.
This is the signal processing layer of the pioneers and settlers who make up this network.
We're here to dissect the graph, debate the NIPs, and engineer the systems that replace centralized control with cryptographic proof.
For this inaugural deep dive, I wanted to talk to someone deep in the engine room of this new reality.
Joining me in the graph today are three people literally writing the code, or in some cases, vibing it, for our future.
Vitor Pamplona from Amethyst, a newly fiat job liberated Derek Ross from SoBox, and David Strahan from Nosfabrica.
Welcome, gentlemen, to the first episode of Say What.
Thanks for having me.
It's great to be here.
scores. So maybe why don't we take a step back, Vitar, and for folks who are unfamiliar,
explain what a trusted assertion is, because it is part of a NIP that you offered,
and then what integrating that into Amethyst actually means.
Awesome. Yeah, so trusted assertions are a way for users to define who they trust,
to run algorithms on Noster that just have more data than what the phone can download.
So picture this.
If you are processing, if you're trying to look for posts that talk about chess, for instance,
and the phone won't be able to download everything to processes
and then get you to the top 10 or top 20 best posts about chess on Noster.
It's just impossible for the phone or any other Nostra client really to do on that client side.
So for these types of activities that we need to process the entirety of Nostra,
we need to go out there and look at the information that each relay has and download it and process it first
and keep downloading, keep processing forever.
For these types of activities, we are much better off helping users select, pick providers to do those services and then just give us the results back to the clients who clients can use as well.
So in this particular activity is trusted assertions allows the user to pick a provider for scores for a provider that will look at all endpubs out there and will just look at what they post, look at what they talk about, look at who they mute or who they follow.
and essentially converge from your point of view.
So if I am choosing a provider, for instance,
from Vitor's point of view,
who are all the other people that Vitor should trust
and by how much?
So by how much part, it becomes a score.
And you can actually score all the other keys
based on what I like to see and what I don't like to see.
And it's individual to my user.
And if you help users to just pick these providers, then everything else kind of falls into place on Nostar because for clients, it's a lot easier to just download those results.
If they already know that their user trusted this particular provider, you can just download and display it on the screen.
So for Amethyst, that translates into scores being displayed into or in the bottom of each one of the profile pictures.
and essentially says, you know what, for you that is using the app,
that you have picked this other provider, this other provider is running an algorithm for you,
you have chosen to give this particular score to everybody else, right?
So, you know, what, say, Derek, to me, is an 85 score.
David is a 100 score, right?
So it's, to me, but, you know, for other people, this could be inverted.
it could be flipped.
So it's not really a centralized scoring provider per se.
This allows users to pick and choose
which algorithms they want to run those scores
and then show that in their screens.
So, Vitor, just to remove any ambiguity there might be,
Amethyst did not calculate any scores, right?
The trusted assertions, which is part of your update,
was just a mechanism, was a template,
which a user can then choose from a score provider of their choice
to populate that.
And that's what shows up on their profile.
Amethyst is not assigning any scores.
Correct.
Not only assigning, but we are not even picking providers,
not even showing providers,
a list of providers on our own screens, for instance.
We don't interfere in any form of that choice
that the user has to make.
And this is why so many people didn't see anything on our new version.
It's because we're kind of forcing them to learn what Web of Trust is,
figure out what the providers are today, which are very few,
and then go to the provider's own website, make an account.
And when you do so, the provider then creates this little event
that essentially makes you trust
or tells everybody else,
all your clients per se,
that you are trusting this provider
to run your algorithm for you.
So until you go through all those hoops
and you understand which one you're picking
and how far this goes,
you don't even know anything.
Nothing like this happens without user approval.
And Ametist doesn't do anything
before you do all those steps,
including go to somebody else's website
to sign up for their own services.
Derek, you are a skeptic, I think, or maybe not.
But I know you have some tough questions.
So based on what Vitor said,
and then we'll pull David into the conversation, Derek.
And I believe, Derek, you're an Amethyst user as well.
What are your thoughts on this?
What are your questions?
I would say that I'm a medium skeptic.
There are some things that I have questions about.
And I also believe that Web of Trust can solve a lot of the issues that we have on Noster from community support, community tools surrounding content moderation, as well as spam prevention and so forth.
And I think that Noster allows us to have attention over our feeds and have attention over the content that we want to see.
So the more user tools that we have that allow us to achieve this, the better.
And I think Web of Trust falls into that realm of possibilities.
So I say possibilities because, as you said, a little skeptical.
I do have some questions, and I think that a lot of people on Noster have a lot of questions
because this was kind of just dropped on people out of nowhere.
And immediately we started seeing people talking about social credit scores
and how this was a social credit score and how we don't like assigning numbers to people.
And no matter how I was trying to frame this as user configurable and so forth,
you know it just brought up more questions so i'd like to talk you know some about some of these
questions and see if we can kind of figure this out and so i guess first and foremost we'll just
we'll just you know come after the elephant in the room here per se so a lot of people think
that web of trust is essentially a social credit system a social credit score is it
is it not
so why don't we start
this is a good time to bring David on
Vitor had mentioned in his answer
about how Amethyst
with this new update
users can choose
a service provider
which is essentially
a provider that calculates
these scores
and David you've spent several years
thinking about this problem
developing your
brainstorm
brainstorm web of trust engine.
Do you want to take a stab at answering Derek's question
of how these are not social credit scores?
Yeah, so I think it's a fair question to just say,
okay, what's the difference between this and social credit score,
Black Mirror, Dystopian, stuff like that.
Yeah, we've seen that episode, right, from Black Mirror,
the woman, her social credit score keeps getting lower and lower over time
to where she basically can't do anything based on her score.
Yeah, she wants a really cute picture of something or other
so that she can be invited to the right parties.
I don't remember the details of the episode,
but so you can go get a loan at a bank.
So you're having to be an influencer on social media.
Nobody wants that.
That's the fiat system.
That's not the system we're trying to rebuild.
And so it's fair to ask, what's the difference?
And to me, the difference boils down to whether it's centralized or decentralized.
Or another way of putting it is whether the scores are global scores or whether they're personalized.
And so what that means is in a black mirror social credit score dystopian,
You've got, you know, the scores are all calculated by the government or by some big central entity.
Yes.
Or, you know, what the world is used to right now is you go to Amazon and you see average scores or you go to eBay, you go to Google, wherever you go, you have these large institutions that are centralized that calculate what I call global scores.
And in a way, global really just means it's personalized to Google.
You know, you're seeing the world from Google's perspective, from Jeff Bezos' perspective, you know, from Amazon's perspective.
So it's a centralized score.
It's a centralized score.
Yeah, it's global.
It's centralized.
Everybody has the same score no matter who.
Well, I mean, not all the same number, but sure, there's only one interpretation of that score.
Exactly.
If you go to Amazon and I go to Amazon and we look at the rating of a product, I think we're going to see the same score.
And if the tech company decides to show you and me different scores, well, it's still centralized because they're the ones who we don't have any idea how they're doing that.
We don't have any control over how the scores are calculated.
We don't know how the scores are calculated.
That's the dystopia.
Yeah And so the opposite of that is scores that are personalized which means that you and I are going to see different potentially see different scores for the same person the same product the same business And you and I are going to have as much control as we want over how the scores are calculated
So that means we, if we want to dive into the details, look under the hood and figure out how the scores are calculated and then change the details, we'll be able to do that.
Now, if we don't want to do that, we will have the ability to delegate those details to our web of trust.
And so still, I'm at the center of my web of trust.
You're at the center of your web of trust.
And so you and I have ultimate control over all of these details.
That doesn't make it difficult because we can delegate all those hard decisions.
But it's personalized. The scores need to be personalized. That, to me, is what makes it different than Black Mirror social credit score.
So you're saying then every single user is in control of their own system, their own web of trust, metrics, weights, provider, everything.
So, for example, I might see, I'll just say a number, I look at you and for me, I see you maybe at 100.
Vieter looks at you and he sees you at 50, just based on Vieter's own metrics, your relationship and so forth.
So every single person on NOSTER would see people at their own personal score level and it's not some central entity.
And probably nobody's two scores would be the same from one person to the next.
So, yes, that's correct.
You would see one score, Vitor would see another score.
Now, they don't have to be different.
It is very, you know, it's possible that your grapevine and Vitor's grapevine
are going to give me the same score, or maybe almost exactly the same score.
You know, maybe it's off by one digit.
And in fact, that's...
David, you use the word grapevine, and many folks listening might not be familiar with it.
Do you want to expand on that before you continue?
Yeah, I should probably just say web of trust.
When I say Grapevine, I mean that it means a web of trust,
but it's the web of trust as implemented by using the tools
that we are building at Nosfabrica,
so the GrapeRank algorithm, for example.
But I probably should have just used web of trust
as a more generic term.
So your web of trust and Vitor's web of trust
and Navi's web of trust might give me the same reputation score
or maybe off just by a little bit, or it could be completely different.
But yeah, that's what it means to be personalized.
Now, some people are going to hear that and think, well, that's chaos.
Everyone sees a different answer.
Using the tools that we've, the brainstorm prototype,
the prototype tools that we've built at NosFabrica so far,
What we're seeing is that if you and I, you know, if five people use the same algorithm to calculate a trust score, then using our tools, those five people are going to, you know, calculate Alice's trust score.
And they're going to get probably almost exactly the same score if they're using the same algorithms and the same parameters, which is actually very exciting to see that.
It means it's a mechanism for all of us to agree on things, on a question, like, is this person trustable?
Even though there's nothing forcing us to agree on the answer to any given question.
I don't know, does that make sense?
It does, David.
But I think what will be helpful here is we're talking about scores.
And Vitor mentioned service providers.
I think what I believe should be clear to the audience is the scores come from the service providers who are running some algorithm.
Now, I think a very obvious follow-up question for anyone listening would be, well, how are these scores calculated?
Or I also think, who are the providers too?
Like how do you get a provider, find a provider?
Who are the providers?
There's a lot of questions about how that number is displayed.
We see the end result, a number, but there's several missing pieces of the puzzle to finding out how we get to the end result.
Yeah.
One of the things that makes it so challenging to talk about is that we're talking about all these very abstract ideas.
And this is why I think it's so great that Amethyst is actually showing these scores because it gives us something concrete to talk about.
So right now, there are three that I know of, different service providers that calculate personalized.
I call these scores personalized and portable.
So it's your scores from your perspective, but it's portable, meaning calculated by a service provider, and then you can consume them someplace else like Amethyst or any client that decides to use these scores.
Now, also, I should just caveat, these service providers ideally are open source, which means you can be your own service provider.
Just like you can run your own Bitcoin node.
You don't have to, but you can.
You can run your own lightning node, your own stir fry, your own, I'm sorry, your own Nostra relay.
You don't have to, but you always have that power.
So right now there are three service providers at various stages of development.
There's Brainstorm, which is what we're building at Nost Fabrica.
And there's a prototype like pre-alpha version that's available right now.
So there's Brainstorm is one.
There is Vertex, which is a second one, which Papelia launched a year or so ago-ish, something like that, which calculates page rank, personalized and global page rank scores.
And then a third one is Relator, which there's a team of people behind that.
And they, I think just last week, just, is that right, Avi and Vitor published, started to publish scores in a way that they can be consumed by Amethyst?
Yeah, Related just shipped a couple days ago, actually.
The module within Related that computes the trust scores that we use on Amethyst.
Okay, so right now, if you go to Amethyst, you have to have your trusted assertions calculated by a service provider
and then published using the NIP85 trusted assertions NIP, which you, Vitor, authored a little over a year ago.
And right now there's maybe 30 or 40 people who have had those scores calculated and published at the Brainstorm prototype.
Vitor, do you know how many people have published them using Relator?
I have no idea.
I think most people with Relator, since you have to deploy your own server with Relator,
it's more of a tool for developers or some higher tech people that can actually do the work of keeping a server alive.
And other folks who just use Brainstorm or Vertex or other service provider can just, you know,
you click a button, they'll sign up and they calculate it for you.
And you're kind of bound to the services they provide behind this algorithm.
So how do I do that?
I can go to Vertex or Brainstorm and sign in with Nostr or whatever and then request that my web of trust, my trusted assertions be generated and published?
Yeah, so you could go, Derek, you could go right now to my straycat.brainstorm.social,
which is in my Noster profile, and click a button to sign in,
click a button to sign up for my prototype service,
click another button to activate trusted assertions,
and then I emphasize this is a prototype.
It's very slow, but I can go and then I will have it calculate all your grapevine, your web of trust scores, and it'll publish those using the NIP85 spec.
Then you can go to Amethyst and you can see that Alice has a score of 89 and Bob has a score of 92.
And those scores are personalized to you.
And since you're using brainstorm, those scores are calculated using follows and mutes and reports.
That's just the way.
I remember doing that a couple months ago whenever we first started talking about this.
So I didn't remember the process.
Thanks for explaining it.
Um, follow up question to that is, do I need to do something, you know, every so often to
get these types of things refreshed?
Or is that something that you continually crawl my, my web of trust and recalculate
every X amount of, you know, days, hours, months or something like, how does this stay
up to date?
so we're rebuilding it right now
from scratch
and the new version of Brainstorm
is going to
keep track of all the follows and mutants
reports in real time
and for
all of them that we can find in the universe
basically, all follows and mutants reports
that we have access to
and then when you sign up
we'll calculate your scores
when you sign up
and we haven't yet
decided how often those are going to be recalculated. It depends on
how many people sign up and how computationally expensive it turns out to be.
Probably they will
automatically be calculated at some set interval.
I don't know if that'll be every day, every week, whatever, something.
Then maybe at some distant point in the future we could start
having a paid service. It'll calculate, it'll update once an hour, something like that.
Or we might have flags that get triggered where let's say that some highly trusted user suddenly gets reported as an imposter by 10 trusted accounts.
Then maybe we'll have a flag that will recalculate that score for everybody who signs up and publish that quick because that's the kind of thing that would need to be updated quickly.
so how often remains to be seen that's going to be in the way that we do it in the way that vertex
vertex currently does not publish trusted assertions i've been trying to convince
to do that and maybe he might do that i think at some point and the way relator does that is going
And, you know, I think Relator and Vertex, they place a high value on you request the scores and you get them calculated quickly.
So it's up to date.
Like, you know, the scores are going to be done five seconds ago.
And so different providers are going to have different answers to that question,
Which is why I think it's so important that we have an ecosystem of lots of service providers.
And as you, Derek, know, people, listeners may not know, at NOS Fabrica, we have a Web of Trust hackathon, which we are in the beginning of.
It's going through April.
And part of our goal is to develop the ecosystem of service providers within NOSTER.
Noster has matured to the point where it is ready to have Web of Trust scores that are personalized and portable, which means Brainstorm, Vertex, Relator, hopefully other entrants into the field will calculate scores.
And then you'll be able to consume them right now at Amethyst.
And Nostria has started incorporating those.
hopefully we'll see more and more clients incorporating these scores
and doing so in a manner where the client doesn't tell the user,
oh, we only integrate with Vertex.
We only integrate with Brainstorm.
What's great about the way that it's working at Amethyst right now
is what Vitor just talked about.
Amethyst doesn't say we're using Brainstorm scores.
It's the end user who decides which service provider that user wants to use.
David, I think it's worth, and Derek, we'll get into the questions again, but this is a good point just to take stock of some of this because there have been a lot of terms we've used.
So we've talked about the service providers and we talked about trusted assertions.
And I think it worth highlighting in simple terms that a trusted assertion is just a Nostra event It is a delivery mechanism for scores that once generated they sit on relays then it up to a client like Amethyst and potentially other clients to then integrate that and show those scores in some manner right to improve the user experience
The trusted assertions themselves do not calculate the scores.
It's the service providers who do.
David mentioned three, Vertex, Relator, and Brainstorm Under Nos Fabrica.
all of them have different methodologies for calculating their scores.
Vertex today uses PageRank, both personalized and global.
They don't publish trusted assertions as things stand.
So if you want the Vertex scores, you'll actually, I believe it's through API,
but I could correct me if I'm wrong here, but Vertex is via API.
Relator, I'm not sure what their methodology is for calculating Web of Trust scores,
but they've just, as of recently, Jesus, the developer of Relator,
he's publishing these as trusted assertions.
So in theory, an amethyst user who's got their scores calculated at Relator
can then show them, they will be displayed on that user's profile.
And then maybe, David, you could talk a little bit about Brainstorm.
brainstorm you said follow a brainstorm uses follows uh mutes and reports to calculate scores
i think it'll be helpful for people to understand that methodology a little bit how how the weights
get assigned for each event uh or each of those uh whether it's a follow mute or a report and the
fact that it's actually extensible meaning this is just one version of brainstorm a user can run
their own, or a client or anyone, right, can run their custom version of Brainstorm that incorporates
different signals. It can be replies, it can be zaps, it can be repos, or whatever it is. It doesn't
have to be follows, meets, and reports. Yeah, so why don't, so different service providers will use
completely different algorithms to calculate scores. And so, yeah, I want to start out with
the way scores are calculated right now
using Brainstorm.
So follows and mutants reports,
if I'm going to calculate Derek's scores,
then everybody's,
it's going to end up with a score between 0 and 1
or between 0 and 100,
depending on just how we communicate it.
Everybody's score by default is a 0.
So if you go to Nostradot band,
there's I think 45 million pub keys.
So every single one of them has a default score of zero from Derek's perspective, except Derek's own pub key has a score which is pinned at one or 100%, however you communicate it.
Meaning Derek is 100% confident that Derek is not a spammer or not a bad actor.
So now if Derek, everybody who Derek follows, the follow will get those and pubs off of zero.
Not all the way up to 100, but we'll get it off zero.
And then if they follow someone, then those, you know, so now Derek's follows and their follows have a score that's above zero.
And every time somebody trusted follows you, it gets your score higher.
and now the score asymptotically approaches 100%.
So if you have 100 trusted people following you,
your score might be 98.
And then if 10,000 trusted people follow you,
your score gets to be 99.
So it's not the kind of score that shows how popular you are.
The purpose of this score is,
can we say with confidence that you're not a bot or a bad actor?
and so follows boost your score up a mute will push your score down and a report will
also push your score down now a follow people follow pretty indiscriminately um but if if
somebody reports someone they usually really mean it and so our default parameters are that a follow
only has a little bit of a weight, but a report carries a big weight. So if, if a hundred people
follow what turns out to be a bad actor, and then 10 people report that as an impersonator,
then that part, that NPUB is going to have a score of zero because the 10 reports are going to
outweigh the 100 follows. Now I'm assuming these are reports and follows by trusted people.
if you
if you're a bad actor
and you spin up a thousand bots
and they all follow you
well that's not going to get your score
off zero because they're bots
and their score is zero
which means we ignore everything that they say
so follows
yeah so right now
this uses follows mutants and reports
to calculate scores
from you
from Derek's perspective
but like you said Avi
This is using the grape rank algorithm, which is designed to be extensible, which means that when we get ready, once we get to the point where we're ready to do this, we'll be able to incorporate zaps into the score or maybe reactions.
A lot of people object to using follows and they say, I'd rather use how much interaction there is.
If somebody replies to me or if I reply to somebody or if I react, give thumbs up to all their posts, well, that's a better indicator than a follow.
And so GrapeRank is designed that it can take that and it can take data no matter where you want to find it.
And it can turn, it can interpret that, meaning you take the follow or you take the zap or the reaction or whatever.
somebody has to write a script
to translate that into
a format
that is ready to be
incorporated into the basic
grape rank
algorithm. And so now you have a
score that is based off of
some other sources of data
that you want to use
for your scores.
So tell me
do you have questions?
Is that making sense?
Eric?
I think that, yes, that makes sense.
And it brings about two questions.
I think first and foremost that when you're out of this, I'll say beta, alpha, whatever phase,
I think the ability to have user-customized weights is more important.
Because, as you said, maybe people follow quite liberally.
So maybe follows aren't the best metric, at least for me.
Maybe my best metric is zaps and comments and so forth.
Or maybe I want to be my web of trust.
I don't care about kind one messages or something like that.
My comments and stuff like that.
I care about producing content on Divine, perhaps.
Or maybe it's I'm a developer, so I want, you know, vibe coding apps with Shakespeare, you know, publishing apps and repositories to be my signal.
So I think being able to truly configure that for every single person is going to be the game changer there.
So when I can truly build a web of trust for myself based off of the types of content that I value.
I think that's when we see a lot of success with Web of Trust.
Now, one of the reasons I've always been skeptical of Web of Trust is new users.
New users have essentially a zero Web of Trust.
They join the ecosystem, and they've never participated in it before.
So they essentially have a score of zero.
Does that mean that they're locked out of the ecosystem?
And does that mean that they're essentially a pariah until they somehow get seen and interacted with?
How does a brand new user compete in this scoring system?
How do they survive?
So that's one of many, many great, great questions.
And GrapeRank, the basic GrapeRank score, was designed with that in mind.
So if you're a new user, let's say a friend brought you on.
So somebody who is trusted within the Nostra ecosystem brings you on.
You sign up, that person follows you.
You've got one follow, and maybe you have like two or three others because of just people you know.
So your score, those first handful of follows are going to boost your great rank score a lot.
And, you know, the last, you know, once you get to Jack Dorsey or Odell or any of us, you know, a single follow doesn't boost our score much at all.
But a small handful of follows is going to get your score way off of zero.
And one of the parameters that you can change is a parameter called rigor.
and rigor basically means how many follows does somebody have to have for you to feel confident
like this person is worth your attention so a high rigor means i'm not going to pay attention
to anybody who doesn't have a hundred trusted follows because they could be a bot but a uh
the opposite end of the extreme a low rigor means if two trusted people follow you well then
I'm convinced you're not a bot and you're worth just as much of my attention as anybody else.
So that rigor, it's a parameter between zero and one.
You can shift it to be whatever you want it to be.
How much attention do you want to pay to new users?
And Derek, I know you've always been great at welcoming new users.
So you might want to set your score to your rigor parameter to be very low
so that you'll see new users as they come up.
Okay.
Now, if I interact with that user without following them,
like if I comment on their post, does that boost their potential score
because Derek commented on their post?
Well, so right now, we're only using follows and mutants reports.
But we have to take this in baby steps.
We can't build out everything all at once.
And so in the future, yes, that will, that the answer is going to be yes.
If you react, if you interact with someone, if you like their posts or answer to them,
then it will boast that person's score.
And I should say that there's not just one score.
There's going to be multiple scores.
There's, you'll have one grape rank score that basically means, is this person, can
we say with confidence that this is not a bad actor?
And that's the score that you can see at Amethyst right now.
If you go to Amethyst and someone has a score of 95,
then that means this is not a bad actor according to your web of trust.
And we say that with 95% confidence.
But in the future, we're going to have a different score
that might mean, is this person, is this NPUB an expert on,
is this a Nostra developer?
And that's a different score.
You might decide to experiment with different methods of calculating these.
So you could have, let's say, one grape rank score
that's calculated using follows and mutants reports.
Then maybe you want to have another one that's calculated
only using zaps and replies and NIP25, Kine7 reactions.
And maybe you use these two scores for the same purpose,
which is to decide who's worth your attention,
just in a very generic sense.
But you use them both just to figure out which one works better.
So you can have the same question that you answer using different algorithms,
or you might have a completely different question.
Is this person an expert in, you know,
is this an account I want to follow because they generate great content on some topic?
That's a different question than whether is this account a Nostra developer,
Different question than can I say with confidence that this is not a bot.
One of the things that I'm really looking forward to in this new age of Noster,
if we do get this Web of Trust scores out there from multiple providers
with very different algorithms and so on,
each one will have their own individual ways to tweak the results
or to include and remove different things.
They will offer different levers to the users.
there will be, at some point, there will be a client
that simply subscribes the user to all of the providers
and puts all of the scores side by side.
So you can see that in provider A,
your best friend is score higher than on provider B.
And you can go there and maybe tweak some of the levers over there and see if you can match it But the goal here is of course to make you aware of what the different ways of scoring people
and different ways that these providers are offering those tools to you.
Because, of course, they're still trusted.
You as a user, somebody else is running this computation for you.
you cannot download all the data to verify if those scores are correct or not.
So by the simple fact that they are publishing these scores as non-stored events,
any other client can just download those events and say, you know what?
Service provider A and service provider B are very similar.
They do have a few things different and you can emphasize those differences inside that client.
But service provider C is trying to do something else and it may not be what you want.
It may only work for a few different folks.
I was using this example with one of the members in our community that said, you know what?
I would like a provider that is aligned with the ideals of my church.
So the scores reflect not only trustworthy you are in the Nostra ecosystem, but also how religious you are in the followings of that church.
and I was like well so be it right you can go there and you can choose one maybe create a
provider maybe the church can have their own ways of doing this and they offer it as a service to
their own parish and you know they can choose to do so the church cannot force them to use
right and no one else can uh we can now influence that decision but no one else can go there and
decide for them so they will need to go there um hopefully they will have a system that they can see
how the scores are different and how each provider is calculating those scores.
And if we can have a client that compares them in a very interesting screen
that can show the differences to users, that would just be highly beneficial to Noster.
And it helps us to understand ourselves, understand what we want to see in Noster
and how much certain types of users should be scored as opposed to others.
You know, what are your preferences? Do you have topics of interest? Do you have, you know, certain types of discussions that you want to see?
Another one of our users were just talking about, OK, I don't want to I don't want to have conflict.
I'm not here to debate people. I'm here to just have fun.
OK, so I want scores that match the level of fun this provider or the level of fun this key is giving me through memes or through discussions or through, you know, some interesting post.
I don't care about the politics.
I don't care about anything that people are talking about on Nostrad.
I don't care about Nostrad itself.
I don't care about anything else.
I only care about me being happy.
And if you are one of those people, I'm sure in the future you're going to find a provider that can actually compute those things for you,
turn them into, say, numbers on your screens,
and you'll be able to see which people to follow and which people to not follow based on your own way of seeing how NOSTA should work.
I think, Vitor, that maybe a question that a lot of people have then is, you know, the first step is to show numbers, which you're doing.
But what features are you thinking of implementing to utilize those numbers?
Sure, spam prevention might be something that's easy, but I think the tools built after we have the numbers are the things that are going to make this web of trust, trusted assertions, really click for people.
what type of use cases because we say oh it's configurable you can have it mean anything
okay so now i have all this data all these numbers what can i do with it so so the easy way here is
like if you are on your notification screen and you're getting hammered by some type of scammer
out there trying to sell you some crypto coin right and these people are getting very smart
they're creating new accounts they're creating uh randomized posts that go around our filters
on Oster and you would like you don't want to see those things as a user you just make the decision
you have made the decision many many years ago but you know the clients are still catching up
to that need to block certain types of contents given what the user has chosen
by having these scores in the app there could be a possibility for on your notification screen to
simply have a filter to not show anything under say 10 on the score range and that and that may
not be your default. Your default may be fully open. You are always seeing everything. But when,
you know, in those times in NOS that we have seen before, where, you know, for a month or two or so,
there's just this bots that they keep coming. And for those two months, you switch to this new view
of like, oh, I only see, you know, scores that are at least 10. And then all of that disappears
from the client because, you know, they don't have enough scores to show up in your content yet.
Of course, during that time, you may also miss some new users.
So there is a back and forth that you have to be thoughtful about.
But in the long run, we hope to get enough or good enough with that tooling that you can actually pick and choose which items to activate and deactivate if you're being attacked or if you're being mocked by other people or not.
And how to protect yourself against these attacks.
on a decentralized network that no one has control over anything.
So everything has to be done kind of by you on your phone.
And these scores just help the client figure out, you know, what are the possibilities there.
If you've already chosen a provider, those scores are already out there.
Clients just need to use it.
So it's all about downloading them, combining them, and, you know, being on a search
or when you're tagging people to help you choose the right Derek on Noster.
You can easily use this course to filter those things out.
I wouldn't call it filters because filters implies that we are hiding things from users.
We're just sorting them in a way that the first ones are the ones that you should be paying attention to.
You can still see the rest, but they're all likely imposters anyway.
So they're just going to be further behind on the list.
And so those filters will exist.
I don't know if we know all of them yet.
we are still exploring a lot of this
this new user
experiences but you know
since we have things out there since we have
this course everything becomes a lot easier
because now clients don't need to compute this
course and develop the feature at
the same time and it
helps Noster in staying
decentralized because we don't actually
want clients computing
scores or doing
that level of processing
we want to decentralize so that your
your Amethyst and your Primo or your Deimos,
we all use the same scores.
And so we just do the screen.
The UI is just a little different within ourselves.
But everybody else is using the same key, the same score set.
I think this is a critical distinction that he hit upon, Vitor,
which is clients not computing the scores.
And David, you had an article called Separation of Trust and Client.
And, you know, when we think about Nostra, obviously the two first class citizens in Nostra are the client and the relay.
And I wonder if because, you know, and we haven't even gotten to curation and discovery yet.
We're just talking about, you know, healthy experience without spam and scammers and so on.
we don't want the client to get into the business of assigning scores calculating scores because
that just it just a bad set of incentives at that point right and as i said we had the two
first class additions the clients and the relays now with web of trust coming in for cure for i guess
spam removal, better browsing experience, and so on.
Do you think, David, that the web of trust service providers,
I don't know if they've become first-class citizens
at the level of Relay, but maybe a 1.5 or something like that?
Yeah, I think they definitely are going to be a whole new thing,
like a whole new entity that will be very important.
Yeah, maybe equal to the others, maybe, like you said, 1.5.
I don't know, something like that.
But I think a question could be,
well, why shouldn't the clients calculate all these scores?
And to me, the answer is the word portability.
I want my web of trust scores to be portable,
meaning I want to go to Primal and Amethyst and see the same score.
Because an 89 out of 100 is going to mean different things
depending on what algorithm you're using
and what parameters you're using.
So if you shift the rigor from one extreme to the other,
an 89 might mean one thing, might mean something else.
So I just want to have to make those choices,
set the algorithm and the parameters once,
figure out that a score of 50 means not worth my time
or maybe a score of 10 means yes, worth my time.
And then see the same score on all the different clients.
So portability is one reason why service providers, I think,
should be an entirely new class of citizens separate from clients.
And then another reason is that a lot of these scores
are just very computationally expensive.
If you're going to calculate page rank or grape rank
or a lot of these scores, you've got to gather together a large amount of data,
do a lot of number crunching,
and it is just not feasible to do all of that on the fly for every score that exists.
Now, historically, there are clients like Coracle and Wikifredia
and some other ones that were pioneers in calculating personalized trust scores.
And they deserve a lot of credit for that pioneering.
I don't know any place outside of Nostra that calculates personalized scores the way we have done.
But they weren't portable.
I would see a different score in one client than another one.
So yeah, where exactly are service providers going to end up in our minds?
I don't know.
Probably something pretty high.
And to be clear, saying that we don't want clients to compute scores
doesn't mean that we can't have scores computed locally, say, on your phone,
and then send it back to the network as trusted assertions to be seen by Amethyst Primal and so on.
There could be a client that does that locally.
What we're trying to avoid is what David was saying,
that the score itself gets committed to the client and can't leave that space
because it's too attached to features or things that were developed for that client.
So if you can, it's possible, probably likely,
that in the future we will see some type of client that does this calculation locally
and just tries to offer that as a solution that you don't need a server
or you don't need a third party to run this course for you.
Your own phone could compute this course while you're sleeping, for instance,
while it's charging on the wall.
so that it doesn't use your battery, but it runs locally,
so you can fully trust the results of that algorithm
because you are seeing the source code,
you are controlling the execution environment,
you are controlling your phone, you know what it does,
and you can actually trust what's happening with it
because it is running locally.
So that is still possible.
The only thing we are saying is that the outcome of that processing
becomes a not-start event,
that then can be seen and not manipulated,
but seen and used by every other client out there.
Yeah, I should probably rephrase what I said earlier.
So I actually do want clients to have the ability
to calculate personalized trust scores.
I just don't want them to be the only ones who do it.
They shouldn't have to carry the entire burden.
So for example, I can imagine one day going to a music app like Toonster
or let's say maybe an e-commerce site
that has five-star ratings on products
and the client might calculate the average five-star rating
of this particular product.
And that's not computationally expensive
because let's say there's 20 ratings,
then it's not a whole lot of data to gather
and you can process it on the fly.
But that calculation, I want that to filter out the spam and I want to ignore authors that are not.
trusted by my web of trusts.
So that calculation would use scores
that are first calculated by a service provider
and then use those for their own calculations
that are done locally on their client.
And then, like Vitor was saying,
ideally, in some cases,
that client might only want to calculate
and crunch the numbers and only use it locally.
they have the option of also publishing the results of that calculation
so that it could be used elsewhere.
Derek, where do you land on service providers
as a key primitive, I guess, in the protocol?
We have clients and relays,
and now we have things like, I guess, Blossom servers,
which are becoming increasingly important.
Where do you see service providers fall on that list?
That's just another part of the ecosystem, right?
Like we started out by just having clients and relays.
We expanded the protocol.
We expanded the ecosystem and the protocol a little bit with media hosting.
Now part of your decentralized social communication arsenal is your media server.
We see different apps popping up that allow us to do what we're doing exactly right now, live streaming, which uses essentially a centralized media host, whether that is coming from like Zap.Stream or from Primal.
I'm using my own Sovereign Sobo
Okay
There you go, okay
But yes, I get your point
Well, the same point is I can run my own Relay
I can run my own Blossom Media server
I can run my own, you know, Cast Livestream server
Maybe you run your own Trusted Assertions server
Because the only person you want to trust is yourself
Maybe it becomes part of the technology stack
I hate to say it because it's a meme at this point, but we're still early.
And I think that we're kind of figuring all of this out as we go forward.
And maybe in the near future, you will have clients that are full-blown service providers that provide half a dozen different value-added services.
They provide the client, but then they also provide the relay.
They provide the streaming service.
They provide the identity service for Nostra addresses.
They provide maybe a lightning wallet for Zaps and all sorts of things.
These are all pieces of the puzzle.
And if we have to add another piece of the puzzle, I think that that's fine because now we don't have one centralized entity that just does everything.
There's half a dozen pieces of the puzzle, and it's all spread out around the ecosystem.
I think that's fine.
I think that is the premises of Noster, that you can run as little or as much of the ecosystem that you want to run.
And if this becomes something that many people want, we will start seeing various service providers running this.
Maybe they charge for their algorithm.
Maybe their algorithm that they're using is superior for some reason, and they're charging you to have assertions published by them.
That very well could be a business model that we see in the future.
Then maybe you have open source models that anybody and everybody can run.
I think that we're still early applies here.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
And the monetization that you talk about, I think we're going to see it.
So there could be a, you know, you could have a, for free,
you can get your scores calculated infrequently,
but then if you want them calculated every day or every hour or every minute.
Absolutely.
I like that.
Then you pay more.
And you can do them on your own if you want.
You could do them on your phone.
but your phone's not connected all the time.
So you have options.
You can do them on their phone just periodically
just to check to make sure that your paid service
is not lying to you, for example.
And what you said, I would imagine
any one user is going to use
lots of different service providers.
So I might want Brainstorm to calculate my basic metric
and then maybe a trust score.
Maybe I want Toonster to calculate my curated list
of trusted musicians or music curators, for example.
I can at the same time have lots of different service providers
who are calculating scores using my web of trust metrics
because they can effectively talk to each other.
You mentioned curation,
And I think this is a good time to talk about that.
So when we think about, or at least up until now in this conversation,
and when people think about web of trust, right,
it's about, well, can we make the experience better by filtering out the spam
or by dealing with the spam somehow and all of that.
And that's an important part of having a good user experience for someone on Noster.
But I believe an equally important part is the discovery itself,
Like, for example, in independent music, which is, you know, a Nostra adjacent ecosystem, right?
Value for value, independent music, or even podcasts for that matter.
If I suddenly find myself saying, look, I have 40 hours a week open, I need to find my podcast, I need to find music to listen to.
And I wanted to be in this ecosystem, right?
I don't want to go to Spotify, I don't want to go to Apple Podcasts or Apple Music or whatever it is.
I want to support independent creators.
Great.
You show up on an app like Fountain.
You show up on a lot or, you know, I don't know what the music app is.
Maybe Derek, one of the ones you vibe coded, right?
I think you did a music app.
That's the beauty of the ecosystem.
It's always growing.
So you show up there and you're like, okay, well, there's all this music.
How do I find something?
Or there are all these podcasts.
How do I find something that I would actually like?
and maybe we start with you, David.
How does web of trust,
and I know there's this,
we're going to throw one more curveball here,
a little more complexity.
There's contextual web of trust, right?
So maybe it might be helpful to talk about that
and how that can help with curation and discovery
and make the user experience fun.
So I think just the ability to filter out the bots
is very, very useful to start to solve this problem.
I mean, in the regular, you know, the fiat world,
the internet as we've known it for so many years,
people make apps where you do, you know,
they're designed to curate something or other.
Like you can go online and you can get ratings of doctors.
You can go to Yelp, you can get ratings of different businesses.
And so you can find what you're looking for that way.
The problem is that the bots and the bad actors creep in.
And so just using similar methods,
but with the added ability to say,
okay, I only want my trusted users to be able to contribute to this.
So let's say if your content,
let's say you want to find people who post cat memes or something,
Then one way to do that would be just do a keyword search for all the events that let say that have the word you looking for And then you just ignore anybody who based on some trust score cutoff
And so now you're going to get probably worthwhile content.
And that's just a simple method.
There's another method that I'm a big,
and maybe this is too much to get into this time,
is decentralized lists.
I want my web of trust to be able to curate a list for me.
So like right now you've got NIP 51 lists, which is a list that I maintain for myself.
If I make a list of Nostra developers, I can use that using NIP 51.
And if I want to add or remove PubKeys from that list, I have to do it myself.
But what if I want to delegate that list to my web of trust?
Then there's a custom nip that I wrote to do that,
which is as simple as I could write it.
But the idea is that anybody can add,
I could create a new list of, I call it Nostra developers,
and then anybody can add pub keys to that list.
And I simply ignore contributions from anybody whose trust score is not above whatever cutoff I decide to have.
So now I've got a living list of Nostra developers.
It can change at any point in time.
I don't have to do anything.
Maybe I submit a bounty to encourage my web of trust to help me curate this list.
then anyone in the world can benefit from it
assuming I haven't encrypted the list header
and now I've got a list of Nostro developers
so then the next step, let's say I want to know
what are the NIPs that are approved by the community
right now you can go to Nostrohub.io
and you can see upvotes and downvotes on custom NIPs
that are filled where anybody who is not,
it's only real Nostra users based on their baseline
who have a trust score.
But I might decide, you know what,
I don't want a list of NIPS curated by any Nostra user.
Maybe I want a list of NIPS that's only curated
by Nostra developers.
So now I'm chaining together different lists.
My list of real people curates the list
of Nostra developers, the list of Nostra developers
curates the list of approved NIPs.
And we can start, chain things together,
and find whatever it is we're looking for
once these tools get built out and used.
David, I think decentralized lists
need an entire episode in and of themselves.
It's a giant rabbit hole.
But maybe, Derek, let me ask you this.
from a discovery and curation standpoint, right?
You talked about new users.
They come in, and right now, if they're on Primal,
Primal has, whatever, 50 NPUBs that you default follow.
And I don't think that's ideal
because it's Primal telling,
or whichever client it might be, right?
Other clients, I suspect, do this too.
but
there's got to be a way for new users
to discover
whom to follow, the different
topics that are being discussed
on Nostra. They're saying, look, I don't want to hear
about Bitcoin. I want to see if someone's talking about
something else. I want to find out about
gardening. Or an existing
user wants to find good music,
good podcasts. How do you think
about
the discovery and curation on
Nostra? And based on this conversation
Do you see how Web Trust can help with that?
I think that part of the issue with Noster, since we don't have these centralized entities to do content recommendation and user recommendation, that people join Noster and they feel like they're in the void.
I think that we have a user retention problem.
I think everybody would probably agree with that.
So maybe Web of Trust can be used for that based on some of these recommended users.
We look across legacy social media, and we do have recommended users through every legacy media app that has ever existed.
Over a decade ago, I was a suggested user on Google+, and that gained me 1.4 million followers back in the day.
So I understand how it works.
um i think that it's also bad too but maybe we can leverage something with web of trust
and maybe we can not just recommend these suggested user list users but we can
recommend people that are part of their web of trust based on certain types of content
right like it's you would still have a little bit of a recommended user but maybe not so much that
user would be recommended. You would be recommending people from their web of trust based on maybe who
you, if you had a join link, like a referral link or something. I don't know. I'm just a bit
balling here. I know that there's something that can be done. There has to be. We have all this
data in a decentralized manner, and we know we have a problem. We just need somebody smarter than
Derek to figure it all out, put it together. Maybe that's Vitor.
But that's, so actually, Derek, you touched on something that Vitor mentioned a few days back or a few weeks back, Vitor, which is maybe Nostra was not ready for Web of Trust up until now.
Now we finally have enough data, enough user behaviors as expressed in events that are sitting on relays that we could actually do something with it.
Yeah, and the reason for that is essentially data, right?
Until, like, I'd say maybe one year ago, we really didn't have a lot of data.
We had a lot of kind of one posts and Twitter-like interfaces that can only go so far, right?
Nostra was very tied to that type of mindset.
Now that we have so many of the other stuff apps going on and getting their own communities aligned and talked about in different ways, you can start to process this data in very different ways to find the things that each user is interested about beyond just followers.
Because for all of the Twitter-like interfaces on Twitter and like on Amethyst, Primo, and Demons, for instance, it's all about follows.
It's kind of like the whole app is designed on this notion of like there are personalities that you need to follow.
And you have this thing in your feed and you kind of follow them.
It's all one thing.
And you don't have multiple communities or multiple lists.
It's all kind of blended together into one interface.
and that kind of worked against us for quite some time
and Amethyst was a big fault in that
and it's I think now
just the right time to start processing the data
to figure out what do people want to actually see
and more importantly
help them tell the app
and tell Noster, the ecosystem
and hopefully the service providers themselves
what they are interested about
and by how much Because until now we only had you know likes replies maybe zaps but they very limited If you start having more interesting things like dynamic lists that David was talking about
that you can put, create as any list you want and you can put any things in there,
you start to see like, I don't just like music.
I like a certain type of music.
So when you're doing content recommendation to me, I don't want to see just music.
I want to see jazz.
I want to see rock. I don't want to see music. You know what I mean? And I think for a very long time, we were stuck in this notion of like the maximum we can do is to offer music to people.
and we knew that no one likes everything in music.
You have to break this down into classes and categories
and maybe age and maybe other things
that will resonate with a new user
or with a user that is looking for something to be,
or to stay on Oster,
to build a community around in Oster.
And I think we're just starting to have that debate
and the level of data to get to that point
that we can actually process it
and figured out how to do better content recommendation engines based on scores.
One of the things that we talked a lot about scores,
and we kept hammering this topic where each person has just one number for any other person, right?
Like Derek is an 80 to me, David's a 90 to me and so on.
and if we go much deeper than that,
we start to realize that the number
doesn't really make much sense.
We want to go further than the number.
We want to say, you know what,
David is a neurologist.
So for neurology topics,
I want those posts to be higher
because I know he's a doctor.
If he talks about baseball,
I want those things to be a 10.
So the same person has different scores based on what the topic of the conversation is about.
And I think we will get that at some point with this framework of like, okay, well, now we're not just scoring people.
We're scoring what they say each time they say and how closely that associates with what the user actually wants to see.
in such a way that people can't just decide to follow, you know, David for the neurology part
or Vitor for the Noster part, but nobody cares about Vitor, the political commentator.
Or you want to follow Derek for the memes and not for, you know, the AI adventures that he is doing.
So you can actually break it down.
And in that point forward, you don't really have just one score per person,
but you have multiple scores.
And now we are talking, now we are trying to see, okay,
this is really a recommendation engine now.
I can actually nail it down to what exactly you want to see,
the types of things you prefer, what you love, what you don't like,
and offer content that is more aligned to what you want to see.
And if you talk about multiple scores, Vitor,
which I think the way you described it makes complete sense, right?
And we're kind of getting to the contextual level of trust with that.
But as a user experience itself,
you're not suggesting that the clients somehow present
all of these multiple scores to the user, right?
It's more about how the content that they're viewing
is presented to them.
Yeah, I think in the end, the scores won't even be there.
We will find a different way to demonstrate
the trust relationship that you have with this particular post
in some other way.
And people have suggested to not score anybody,
You just do, I don't know, a star system or, you know, a yes or no verification metric and so on.
Nothing is really perfect, but the score in the end might not even stay in the app.
What is the important part is can we let them know, one, can, if you, remember, the scores or anything in Web of Trust, they're not really designed to reinforce your follows.
You already trust their follows.
You already know that.
You already know them.
You know their pictures.
when they show up, you are happy to engage in that post.
This course or anything associated like this course
help you talk to people you don't know,
that you have never seen before on Oster.
And you don't know if this person is a scammer,
is an impersonator, or is a real person,
someone else in the world that you just have never seen.
One of the things that I have realized
while using the new version of Amethyst
is how much more I reply to folks
that have a high score because of my network is following them,
but I have never seen them before.
And the score just gives me that additional confidence that I say,
if I reply, I'm not going to be attacked by this scammer
and trying to steal money from me over and over again
because I know that the person has some higher scores.
So I think that is the notion we want to grab.
Whatever convinces users or translates the trust or the score information into something that the users just need to look at and engage with that user or the new user, that's how we want to get in the end.
The score itself is just one of the ways to get there.
And I'm pretty sure it's an ugly way.
It's a very technical way.
And we may not even see it in the future as soon as we figure something better out.
Yeah, I think all these numbers, there will be times when we want the scores to be displayed prominently and times when we want all the scores to be just working under the hood.
I think right now I'm glad that we're having clients like Amethyst show the scores because these are new tools that we're introducing to the Nostra ecosystem and we need people to know that the tools exist and what they are.
but at some point, you know, you don't want to shove a bunch of numbers into your users' faces
and just, you know, it's just too much.
It's confusing. People don't know what they mean.
Right. So we will put them...
I have people asking me, well, I'm a 67. What does that mean? I'm a 97. What does that mean?
Yeah. And so it's, so I'm glad people are asking those questions because,
there's so many moving parts to all this. We can't build all of them at the same time.
Nostra is developing one in baby steps. It was a couple of years ago that clients were calculating
personalized trust scores. And now we're at the point of making them portable with service
providers. And I think contextual is going to be what comes next, but we can't do that until we have
a relatively healthy, you know, at least have a handful of service providers who are calculating
scores that are personalized and portable. Then we can start focusing on the contextual scores.
So it's baby steps and we need to, we can't do them in the wrong order even. You know, I don't
think we could do contextual scores without having them portable or at least we couldn't
it wouldn't work effectively to do that yeah uh derek any last question for either vitor or david
well
how can
myself as an individual
or
a developer
provider
an interested party
run one of these
trusted assertions
one of these web of trust calculators
what can I do to get started
soapbox
Sure. Maybe I'm asking for Soapbox. Maybe I'm asking for, you know, I'm a cool dev dot com.
I mean, whatever. How can I run one to start playing with this?
Because you know right now I hearing that there a lot of centralization and there has to be in the beginning because you have to start somewhere But we from the group of the world that doesn like centralization
So we need more of these providers to start popping up, to start experimenting.
So how can people contribute?
How can they run something?
How can I be my own web of trust provider?
so today I think if you download Relator
and run yourself and deploy the server
it should do everything we just talked about
and give you the scores you want
I'm guessing like in a few weeks or so
we're going to have the new version for Brainstorm
and that will also be similar
you deploy it on server
and Brainstorm will compute the same scores
that we computed for ourselves
for our test stations.
You'll be able to do it by yourself.
We can change the equations as well, of course.
And hopefully there is more.
But for now, I think those will be the only options.
Yeah, so Brainstorm is going to be open source,
like Vitor just said.
So hopefully in a couple of weeks,
you will be able to download and run Brainstorm software
and calculate your own basic trust scores.
I would say before doing that,
it would be worthwhile to use those personalized trust scores.
And that would be a great thing for vibe coding sessions
is to make an app where you can upvote your favorite music,
but only look at upvotes that are from your trusted web of trust
using scores that are made by a service provider.
So I think that would be something you might be able to start doing soon, like right now, is just consuming those scores for various different purposes.
Yeah, I think that's important is we need use cases.
We can have scores, but they don't really mean a whole lot because people don't know what they mean and people don't really know how to use them.
So we need easy ways for people to calculate them and then easy ways for people to use them.
Otherwise, they're not as important as we feel they should be.
So if you were going to vibe code an app that uses the scores that are already created, what would you want to use them for?
Why are you putting me on the spot like this, David?
I don't know.
That's true.
You know, I'll tell you what.
Let's maybe, since we're talking about vibe coding and that's my current kick, maybe we could do something for showing projects that people built on Shakespeare.
Right?
Like the app, similar to Nosterhub, very similar to that for showing like nips and so forth.
But maybe we'd be showing repositories or apps and the more upvotes from our web of trust, they would be featured and so forth.
Can I make a suggestion, Derek?
Maybe you call it It's Alive because one of the –
Frankenstein was a meme for Shakespeare for a while.
We were literally calling it that and making memes.
That kind of works out.
The reason I bring that up is one of the unfortunate side effects of vibe coding is the abandoned wear, right?
There's an explosion of abandoned wear.
And maybe if you can have upvotes or downvotes for apps that are actually alive, being maintained and being used, I think that'll be helpful, right?
Yeah, that's what a directory of actively maintained and used vibe coded apps.
I think that might work.
Yeah.
So should we schedule a vibe coding session to build this?
Maybe.
Derek's got Shakespeare plugged in.
The audio is going straight to Shakespeare.
Yeah, Shakespeare's building as it speaks.
I think that would be fun.
So I do a weekly vibe coding jam session every Monday night,
about five and a half hours from now.
I'll be doing one.
And then next week and so forth, we do them every week to where people can talk about ideas, things that they're interested in building, working on, get live feedback from people.
Maybe next week we talk about that as saying is that something that's currently in the discussion realm and maybe start tossing some ideas out there about what people could build, what people could vibe code.
I'd say if you haven't vibe-coded something like that by Nostra Nights, we can maybe sit down at Bitcoin Park and plan something out.
Okay, yeah, that's coming up in a couple weeks.
So before we drop, and we've been going for close to 90 minutes here, Derek, do you want to plug Nostra Nights?
well sure we i guess we kind of just did nostril nights is february 2nd at bitcoin park in nashville
tennessee where is a the first of quarterly events where we will go and discuss all of the
things happening around the purple verse from vibe coding since that is the hottest latest way to
watch your ideas come to life.
Toil is content ecosystems, app updates, and so forth like that, just growing the Nostra
ecosystem.
The first one that's happening here in a few weeks, we're having Will Kassarin, friend
of all of us here from Damas, that will be speaking about what's coming next on Damas.
David will be there talking more about Web of Trust, so come and ask questions, IRL, to
David and then open mic and myself will be talking about our vision for Nostra
nights throughout 2026.
And we will have food from the empanadas food truck.
I forget the name of it,
but they're delicious empanadas.
We've had them in Nashville before and food is covered by our amazing
sponsors.
So see you there.
You heard it here,
folks.
if the stellar cast of characters
and the quality of content isn't reason enough
for anyone within a three-hour radius of Nashville
to show up on February 2nd, you said, right, Derek?
For Nostanites at Bitcoin Park,
then the free empanadas should get you over that line.
Come on.
It is really good food.
All right, folks.
Well, that wraps up our very first episode
of Say What by Plep Chain Radio.
Remember, folks, this is a value for value production.
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maybe in a couple of weeks.
Thank you, Avi.
Yeah, thank you.
It's been great to be here.