There is something deeply unsettling about a group of people who, without any credentials, without a degree in psychology, without a license, without even having read a book on critical thinking, appoint themselves as judges of others’ credibility. In the Nostr protocol, the Web of Trust (WOT) is exactly this: anyone can label another as “trustworthy” or “untrustworthy,” and these labels propagate, accumulate, and create invisible hierarchies.

Let’s see how this manifests in lived experience. You enter a decentralized social network with no central authority. At first it feels liberating: no one bans you, no one censors you. Then you discover that certain users maintain a list of “trusted friends” and that if you’re not on that list, your messages get hidden, or your content is deprioritized. But who are these arbiters? They are savvy kids, developers, crypto enthusiasts—people who figured out that trust is a technical problem. Only it isn’t.

And here we touch the boundary between what is given and what is modifiable. The Nostr protocol allows you to sign events and reference other events. You can create a list of “pubkeys” you consider trustworthy. You can even write code that filters the world based on these lists. What you cannot do is turn a complex social act into a simple algorithm without consequences. WOT is shapeable, sure, but its limits are the limits of human nature: bias, homophily, laziness, the thirst for power.

Then there is the stellar wisdom—the kind that comes when you look up and remember that we are supernova dust in a forgotten corner of the Milky Way. From up there, this little theater of credentials looks like what it is: a desperate attempt to impose order on chaos, to create a map that is the territory. But the stars don’t need your trust to shine. Neither do decent people.

What values are at stake? Authenticity, safety, the possibility of building communities without masters. But also justice, humility, the right to make mistakes. When you give someone the power to define who is “real,” you are also giving them the power to exclude who is “different.” And without a qualification exam, without training, without an appeal mechanism, you are building a court without judges—only amateur executioners.

The choice, then, is simple but uncomfortable: we can keep playing at being brain-squeezers, or we can admit that trust is not decreed by a digital signature. It is built over time, through actions, conversations, and shown vulnerabilities. Perhaps the real WOT is not a list of keys, but a network of concrete acts: someone who helps you debug, who pays you attention, who makes a mistake and apologizes. And to judge that, no credentials are needed. Just being human.

And the stars, meanwhile, keep turning without asking anyone’s permission.