Oddbean new post about login | logout 'How to locate knowledge of data trough other peers using only one communication method?' Think about it and transform it into an analogy that fits better into your way of thinking. What is your analogy? And can you come up with a (partial) solution? #asknostr #decentralization
Does one communication method mean something like: only on nostr? Or do you mean: a single unified protocol or algorithm for extracting data of interest from your peer network?
A single communication method in the sense of that there is no information flowing outside of this method. The medium could be radio, digital infrastructure etc, but all the information is coming from other peers. And there is no single defined lookup data point.
So only peers that you connect to provide you with information about peers. And that information is relative to them as there is no other reference point than the global known information that is for every peer accessible: their local surroundings.
The Grapevine may be what you’re looking for. The Grapevine enables you and your community to identify who is the most trustworthy, and in what context, so they can help you curate content, facts and information. It revolves around the idea of a data model, which could be as simple as a list of nostr apps or a graph of a nostr app categories, but can be as complex as it needs to be. Here is the walkthrough of a proof of concept for the decentralized curation of a simple list: https://github.com/wds4/pretty-good/blob/main/appDescriptions/curatedLists/overview.md Note that there is no single point of failure, bc you are always at the center of your Grapevine.
Nice one, although that was not exactly what I meant. Because my question is about how you would localize your peers and grapevines.
By localize you mean how do you select them?
No, how do you know who has content that you want kinda thing
Ah, so: how do you find that one person who happens to have exactly the info that you’re looking for in some niche topic? Despite being on the other side of the world, multiple hops away from you in any given social graph, and with no more than a handful of followers? How do you find the needle in the haystack?
Soo we need to split up the problem
So can you think of seperate problems that need to be solved in order for this to be (partially) solved?
Many. Here’s one: The Grapevine calculates an influence score that is context based — eg, Alice’s Grapevine tells her that Bob is awesome at rating movies in the comedies genre, so he gets a high score in that context, which means if she’s looking for a comedy to watch tonight, his ratings of comedies are weighted heavily. Problem: how to calculate the Influence score in a way that doesn’t give undue influence to Bob just because he has a zillion followers? The Grapevine’s solution: https://habla.news/a/naddr1qqxnzdes8q6rwv3hxs6rjvpeqgs98k45ww24g26dl8yatvefx3qrkaglp2yzu6dm3hv2vcxl822lqtgrqsqqqa28kn8wur
I believe you are talking about content rating, but this problem is an even more to the ground problem. Kinda a fundamental one. I think the problem is in the infrastructure itself. The most basic low-level stuff of how peers can know where to connect to beforehand to get certain data. in this case: how does Alice even find bob and his content every day, in a decentralized unstructured (or minimal) manner?
The way the Grapevine works, trust is contextual, and contexts are categorized, with trust inherited from general to specific categories. Example: User A trusts User B in all contexts; B trusts C on medical topics; C trusts D on pulmonary topics; D trusts E on treatment protocols for pulmonary tuberculosis. Each of these links is an attestation stored in nostr, and this is how User A finds User E and benefits from E’s expertise.
That is a really nice concept. Is it also implementable without tying it to individuals?
You mean could I make an attestation regarding a pseudonymous user account? Or an AI? Or a group? Yes to all!
Is it possible to implement this with individual data, (interpret data based on ...) instead of with an unique entity?
You will be able to design rating templates where the things being rated is a piece of data, and the fields are whatever serves your purpose. Maybe the rating template is a flag that the data is true or false, or is (or is not) NSFW, or is / is not supported by randomized clinical trial data, etc. And you could attach a confidence rating so you can indicate how sure you are of your rating. And a comments field, if you like. And if the community likes your template and it gets a lot of use, the Grapevine will be able to compute weighted average scores, where the weight of each rating depends on the influence score of the rater in the appropriate context.