Personally I would leave this part out of any standard you write because a lot of it falls under "implementation details" which you can punt elsewhere

@gavinchait@wandering.shop @benpate@mastodon.social @scottjenson@social.coop @ramsey@phpc.social

Endorsements tech tree when?

With an associated category on activitypub.space?

@evan@cosocial.ca

@julian @ramsey @scottjenson @GavinChait

@benpate@mastodon.social @scottjenson@social.coop

I could see how thumbs up/down or ratings can lead to low/med/high scores, but just a simple “I endorse” toggle won’t have much signal, unless it’s treated as a percentage against followers or some kind of static thresholds (e.g., <25 is low, <100 is med, etc.).

There's a lot of magic here, and if we're not careful, we'll make it far too complex to the user. I'm leaning towards a simple three icon approach: low (some type of endorsement) medium (good endorsement) and high (exceptionally strong). There can also be NO icon at all.

I don't think someone cares if someone is 67% endorsed versus 78% endorsed.

I also think that endorsements are going to be somewhat rare (at least at first) so the chances of this icons showing up AT ALL is quite low. I'm playing with the idea that your followers endorsements act as a weak signal (low). This provides a 'gateway scoring' system that gets people exposed without initiallying having any endorsements of their own.

Thoughts?

@ramsey @benpate @tchambers

Going backwards in my use case:
Book -> attestations for authorship & editorial approval.
Authorship -> attestation that author appointed editor
Editor -> attestation that instance admin recognises editorial role
Admin -> instance attests admin appointment

Each critical attestation can answer the question: what is being attested, who is doing the attesting, & by what authority?

@GavinChait

So:
A Endorses-> B
B Endorses -> C
C Endorses -> A

Imagine this X 10,000 fake accounts

So, with your "weights" idea, the value of each endorsement might be computed as a fraction of the total number of endorsements I've issued?

@osma @scottjenson @GavinChait

1. My software asks the only person it trusts, activitypub.social, who responds with "no clue, but I trust fosstodon.org, so ask there"
2. So it asks fosstodon.org, who says "no clue, but I trust mastodon.social and someothersite.social, so ask them"
3. So it asks mastodon.social and it says "yes I know Ben Pate, he's a pretty cool fellow"

<img class="not-responsive emoji" src="https://activitypub.space/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/2714.png?v=c7cc56fe415" title="" />

<img class="not-responsive emoji" src="https://activitypub.space/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f937.png?v=c7cc56fe415" title="" />

And is an attestation ultimately the same as decentralised labels are on ATproto? While those were (I think?) created for kind of moderation, I’ve seen them being used for entirely different purposes, like signaling account age.
@GavinChait @scottjenson @benpate

Ultimately, decisions about "who to trust" will be up to each individual app/server/user. So, we don't REALLY need that in a simple protocol design about how to publish Endorsements.

But, we want to work our some solid recommendations so that our first dozen implementation aren't immediately abused by the people we're trying to reign in.

@osma @scottjenson @GavinChait

I love this discussion because it gets right to the heart of the human nature, Fediverse, and what makes this the right technology for us to build on.

And, I love the can of worms that we've opened here. I'm still reading through your email about Endorsements and Attestations probably being different beasts -- that may be a good choice. But each is going to learn from the other, so I'm eager to dig deeper into this

But I often find a very simple implementation detail can short circuit all sorts of theory based navel gazing. That is likely going to be the biggest hurdle, to ground the discussion so we don't wander off into "the land of the perfect design"

I'm optimistic that various "endorsement types" might help us, with corresponding expectations and norms around each one.

I still have to digest Gavin's most recent emails, then I'll try to put something forward.

Above all, I'm happy to be the secretary on this, but this FEP will be everyone's design.

@scottjenson @GavinChait @ozoned