TrustNet plus Semaphore on ATProto custom lexicons is the most practical foundation for CSN V5's trust network, combining subjective multi-dimensional trust scores, anonymous ZK-based voting, and verifiable append-only audit logs — all implementable in your TypeScript/Express/PostgreSQL stack without blockchain dependencies. The ATProto ecosystem's lexicon extensibility, labeler infrastructure, and January 2026 DID:PLC streaming API provide the protocol-level primitives needed to make trust a first-class citizen of the federated network. Real-world cooperative governance patterns and hard lessons from fediverse trust systems (SourceCred's collapse, The Bad Space controversy, IFTAS's funding crisis) point toward a tiered, human-in-the-loop trust architecture where algorithmic scores inform but never replace democratic membership decisions.
For a platform serving 50–5,000 members, two comp
