Affinity Layer

All your likes are belong to us.

Layer 1: Who's who, Identity,
Layer 2: Who matters, who's interesting, who's reliable... Afinity

The Nerd'ster demos this using "follow contexts" that allow following people for different contexts, such as music, news, books, local, under30, and so on..

The idea is to allow services leverage your affinity preferences across services.

Read the New York Times and like someone's feedback? See their comments highlighed on the Wall Street Journal.
Report a positive interaction with an Ebay seller? Have that reflect upon them as an Uber driver.
Know someone in real life? Trust them? Respect them? Express that so that we can all leverage your judgement.

(This necessarily relies on the ability to know who's who and to identify individuals, which is accomplished in the Identity layer.)

This demo starts with Bart's PoV using his "social" context.

check out whom he follows for which contexts on this pane (network view)
go back to the content view to see how switching follow contexts affects content.
change PoV and follow contexts freely...

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The Nerd'ster is public about whom you follow how; not all services need to do that.

Identities, not Accounts (or delegates)

Below is the interpreted statement from the demo above showing that Bart follows Milhouse.

{

"statement": "org.nerdster",

"time": "7/23/2024 12:00 AM",

"I": "Boy@nerdster.org",

"follow": "Milhouse",

"with": {

"contexts": {

"social": 1

}

Notice that the statement is signed using Bart's delegate key on the Nerd'ster. The Nerd'ster can't sign with any other key as its delegate key is the only private key it has for Bart, but it can reference Milhouse's identity key, not his account. (Milhouse doesn't even need a Nerd'ster account for Bart to follow him.)

This enables any service to recognize that Bart follows Milhouse. Services like NYT, Reddit, X, and others could adopt this and allow us to use their own services and interfaces to follow each other across other services and interfaces.

And so you could be reading the New York Times, appreciate someone's comment, and use your New York Times delegate key to follow him for "news".

All services could then know you follow that person for news.
You as well as those who follow you for news could see that person's comments perferred.

Same in case you didn't exactly appreciate someone's X tweet - censor him everywhere and do the network who lets you censor for them a service.

Follow, trust, block, censor, ...

This stuff gives us the ability to reference people (not accounts), and so in case you want to follow a NYT commenter or block an X.com tweeter, you can have that apply to them, not just that particular account.

(No, I don't want the Gov't or Elon to censor for me. I want my chosen network to do it for me.)

Most likes = pop + spam + bots (Most viewed likely = clickbait)
Knowing identity removes the spam and bots
Knowing affinity helps find what I might care about. In case I'm surprised at something I read, I might even open my mind and learn something.

The <nerdster> default follow context

By default, anyone you ONE-OF-US trust is in your "<nerdster>" follow context. This works well for a network with almost no-one on it, but it won't scale; you'll know a lot of humans exist (ONE-OF-US = human), but not all humans are interesting to you. You should explicitely un-follow them for the <nerdster> context (right click on the person, choose Follow..., choose the <nerdster> context and set it to "block".

Affinity Layer

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Identities, not Accounts (or delegates)

Follow, trust, block, censor, ...

The <nerdster> default follow context