A calculator, not a judge

There is no single score in 6d trust. There is no master list of trusted people, no global root, no throne. This is a deliberate refusal, and it is the difference between a calculator and a judge.

A root is a worldview, not a ranking

A root is a set of seed identities you take as trusted-by-definition — the axioms of your worldview. Trust is computed relative to that root. Pick different seeds and the same graph yields different verdicts: a person can be trusted from one root and pending from another, and both answers are correct, because they are answers to different questions.

This is not a hedge or an unfinished feature. It is the design. A trust metric that hands down one universal verdict is making a political claim about whose judgment is canonical. By computing relative to your seeds, the service makes no such claim. It does not know who is trustworthy in the abstract — that question has no answer — only who is reachable from the seeds you named.

The service is an index, not an authority

Every vouch is signed by the voucher’s key, so it is self-authenticating: anyone can verify it without trusting whoever runs the service. The aggregator is an index, not an authority. It cannot forge an edge, and it cannot silently drop one. If it did, the signatures would not check out.

That property is what lets the service stay neutral under pressure. There is no lever to pull to declare someone trusted or untrusted globally, because no global verdict exists to manipulate. The most the operator can do is compute a flow you could have computed yourself from the same public, signed edges.

What this means in practice

• No appeals to the platform. Being “untrusted” is not a punishment handed down — it means the current from a particular root did not reach you. From a different root it might.
• Forking is free. Disagree with a community’s seeds? Choose your own. The graph is shared; the worldview is yours.
• The operator holds no power they could be coerced into abusing, because the verdict is a function of public data and your seeds, not of their say-so.

A judge decides. A calculator computes. This is the second thing.