Tangled now has native support for vouching! You can vouch or denounce users that you interact with. Vouched users will have a green shield icon beside their profile pictures, and denounced users will have a red one. You can use this to inform decisions about an interaction. You can also see the vouch/denounce decisions made by your circle.
why vouch?#
Vouching serves as a signal of trust to your circle.
The bar to submit code to a project has never been lower thanks to LLM based tooling. LLM tools are really good at creating "uncanny valley" submissions. Code that looks correct but is subtly wrong. The onus is on maintainers to now take the time to review such submissions. To ease this burden, maintainers from across the Tangled network can now vouch for or denounce contributors that misuse these tools and create a maintenance burden.
mindful design#
Such systems need careful consideration. Vouching on Tangled includes the following to begin with:
- vouching/denouncing with a text-based reason field
- attenuation: you can only view decisions made by you and your circle
- no consequences to being denounced: at present, denounced users aren't blocked from the project, but simply have a red warning label in parts of the UI
Some additions that I want to put in down the line:
- decay of vouches: maintainers and contributors tend to move on from projects over time, so vouches should decay as time passes, and be renewed every now and then
- evidence trails: vouching for a user right after merging a PR should add the PR to the vouch record as a piece of evidence
how it works#
When you vouch for or denounce somebody on Tangled, you create a public record on your PDS. The record includes:
- whether you vouched for or denounced somebody
- an optional reason for doing so
The Tangled appview then aggregates vouch data from across the network, and displays vouch "hats" over profiles at points of interaction:
- in issues and issue comments
- in pull-requests and pull-request comments
A hat appears over a user only if you have directly vouched/denounced them, or if somebody you have vouched for has vouched/denounced them.
Additionally, there are no consequences for a denounced user. Only a hat. You can click on the hat to see who vouched/denounced this user in your circle. The consequences may change eventually, but for now you can use the hat to inform a decision.
Start building your web of trust on Tangled today.