The term "trust" in "web of trust" refers to authentication, not to authorization. In other words, web of trust provides an attestation of the authenticity of a given identity, independent of application. Follow lists do a great job of this.
Only leveraging the authenticity of a given pubkey relative to yourself for a particular purpose other than fetching and displaying social content (the explicit intention behind "follows") requires additional information. Often this can be provided by the user through common sense (e.g. identifying a satire account), or addition attestations (I fully/partially trust this person for purpose x, and transitively trust them to make the same kind of attestations about other accounts).
Follow-based web of trust authentication is a substrate upon which unqualified and qualified web of trust application-specific authorization can be built.
This thought courtesy of my reading of Ashish Gulhati's essay "Secure Communication: The Technology of Freedom" in "Beautiful Code" this fine Sunday afternoon.
hodlbod /
npub1jl…jynqn
2024-10-13 21:21:41
Author Public Key
npub1jlrs53pkdfjnts29kveljul2sm0actt6n8dxrrzqcersttvcuv3qdjynqnSeen on
wss://relay.damus.ioPublished at
2024-10-13 21:21:41Event JSON
{
"id": "a05c680016c2b3a4a8a43af59084f072d439fdb659db1c35a2f06c95483aaf98",
"pubkey": "97c70a44366a6535c145b333f973ea86dfdc2d7a99da618c40c64705ad98e322",
"created_at": 1728854501,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"client",
"Coracle",
"31990:97c70a44366a6535c145b333f973ea86dfdc2d7a99da618c40c64705ad98e322:1685968093690"
]
],
"content": "The term \"trust\" in \"web of trust\" refers to authentication, not to authorization. In other words, web of trust provides an attestation of the authenticity of a given identity, independent of application. Follow lists do a great job of this. \n\nOnly leveraging the authenticity of a given pubkey relative to yourself for a particular purpose other than fetching and displaying social content (the explicit intention behind \"follows\") requires additional information. Often this can be provided by the user through common sense (e.g. identifying a satire account), or addition attestations (I fully/partially trust this person for purpose x, and transitively trust them to make the same kind of attestations about other accounts).\n\nFollow-based web of trust authentication is a substrate upon which unqualified and qualified web of trust application-specific authorization can be built.\n\nThis thought courtesy of my reading of Ashish Gulhati's essay \"Secure Communication: The Technology of Freedom\" in \"Beautiful Code\" this fine Sunday afternoon.",
"sig": "23058554a043756b46bc02ad2a70425aa071a8751180d0c2fe2967b30b8deeff568d28500c45fa01e50ea961d83a902b5989445ca21f4f0ac35dd6098a5777d1"
}