Martti Malmi (likely the second dev after Satoshi) release Iris, a social networking application that stores everything on the devices of its users and supports p2p connections.

When you upvote someone, they become your 1st degree contact. The accounts they upvoted become 2nd degree contacts. Then there are 3rd degree contacts and so on. This is the web of trust, which can be used to filter all content on Iris. Hiding users by downvoting is also possible.

Now that is a fascinating take on making voting into something more than an 'I agree' button. I'll be curious to see what sort of network effects emerge from that mechanism. I'm a bit skeptical, seems like it'll self-sort the users into worldview-based silos that don't interact with each other directly, unless other mechanisms are created to deal with that fracturing. The author is coming at this from a market/ratings mindset. It is good to see people outside of Tildes thinking about trust mechanics as a cornerstone of social media sites, though.

How does this differ from Scuttlebutt?