6d trust

Most of the internet decides who to trust by counting — followers, stars, upvotes, blue checks. But counting is trivially fake; identities are free. We built the whole web on a trust signal that's for sale. I've been building something that doesn't count. 🧵

We are now open source: github.com/6digit-studio/6dt…

Now minting roots for communities/non-profits. First out, @korulang

The math isn't mine — Raph Levien designed it for Advogato in 1998. My one change: the root is yours, not the world's. It's free, and it runs on the trust you already hold. Vouch for the people whose work you rely on, by their handle → 6dtrust.com

Change the root, the verdict changes — and both answers are right, because they answer different questions. It's a calculator, not a judge. You keep the judgment; it does the math.

Which means an attacker can conjure a million fake accounts and buy nothing. The bottleneck is the one real vouch, and they don't control it. That's what "attack-resistant" actually means.

From that root, trust flows through signed vouches — people certifying people. And it flows like a current, not a contagion: it weakens with distance, and how much reaches any cluster is capped by the honest edges leading into it.

Trust was never global. It's subjective — not arbitrary, just dependent on where you're standing. So 6d trust doesn't hand down a verdict. It computes one, relative to a root you choose: an open-source community, your company, or just you.

The usual fix is a better global score — one universal number for who's trustworthy. That's the deeper mistake. There's no number that's true for everyone. Whether you should trust someone depends on who you already trust.