I think that could work well. At the very least, I want the feature where I can see how many times I’ve upvoted/down voted a given individual when they post.

That wouldn’t/shouldn’t give you transitive data imo, because voting for something doesn’t mean you trust them, just that the content is valuable (e.g. it could be a useful bot).

My point is you can have a mixed system. For example:

• server stores list of “special interest” users (followed users, WoT, mods, etc)
• server stores who voted for what (already does)
• client updates the server’s list of “special interest” users with WoT data
• when retrieving metadata about a post, you’d get:
  • total votes
  • votes from “special interest” users
  • total votes from your instance

That’s not a ton of data, and the “special interest” users wouldn’t need to be synchronized to any other instance. The client would store the WoT data and update the server as needed (this way the server doesn’t need any transitive logic, the client handles it).

That sounds a bit hyperbolic.

You can externalize the web of trust with a decentralized system, and then just link it to accounts at whatever service you’re using. You could use a browser extension, for example, that shows you whether you trust a commenter or poster.

That list wouldn’t get federated out, it could live in its own ecosystem, and update your local instance so it provides a separate list of votes for people in your web of trust. So only your admin (which could be you!) would know who you trust, and it would send two sets of vote totals to your client (or maybe three if you wanted to know how many votes it got from your instance alone).

So no, I don’t think it needs to be invasive at all.