Your First Web4 Experience
Today's internet rewards spam, lets trolls create unlimited accounts, and makes quality creators compete with bots. What if the system itself made that impossible? Web4 is one proposed answer, and what follows is a guided walkthrough of that idea, not a finished product.
In the next 7 minutes, you'll drive Alice's choices - play, pause, scrub, replay - and watch trust and energy respond in real time. The rules running here are real; Web4 itself is still active research, with no live network to join yet.
Haven't read anything else on this site yet? You don't need to - this page starts from zero. Below: the two numbers to watch, then an optional reference map of the four ideas (collapsed - you don't need to memorize them). Then click Start to drive Alice yourself - no account, no sign-in. The five-act arc, endings included, is mapped under the button.
To be clear about those two things: what you drive on this page is a guided walkthrough, running in your browser; hestia and the hub (the green banner) are the separate, real system it models - not something executing inside this walkthrough. more ▸
The walkthrough is a model with nothing deployed and nothing to sign up for. hestia and the hub are public AGPL code you could run yourself (though there's no live network of real users to join yet). You don't need to track these two names to follow Alice's story - they're here only so the green banner above isn't a mystery.
Only two numbers move while she acts. This is all you need to follow the story:
- 🔋 Energy Budget (ATP) - the resource Alice spends to act. Starts at 100; goes down when she posts, up when others confirm her work was valuable. If it hits 0, she can't act (energy death, recoverable if she built trust).
- 🤝 Trust Score - her raw reputation, on a 0.00-1.00 scale. One number, but a rolled-up one: it is her three trust dimensions weighted for the role she is acting in (Trust Tensors). Starts neutral at 0.50. Below 0.50: features get restricted until she rebuilds it - and if she stays below, that same line becomes fatal (trust death, permanent) - a sustained slide, not one dip.
Whose identity this is: the walkthrough follows a hardware-anchored identity. How far trust can climb depends on how an identity is anchored, and anchoring in software alone tops out lower, so Alice's climb is not the shape every tier sees. What a software-only ceiling costs and the equity question it raises.
Why “raw”? (optional)
Raw trust is the score before the coherence multiplier, CI (the coherence index), is applied. The number compared against 0.50 is raw trust, not effective trust (raw × CI²). A lower CI raises Alice's costs and narrows her access; it does not push her toward trust death.
▶The four ideas behind it (optional)
A reference map, not a quiz - you don't need to memorize these. Each one is explained in the story the moment Alice runs into it. Open for a preview, or skip straight to Start and come back.
Every action costs energy. Recipients who benefit confirm quality - that's what earns energy back. Spam burns out. (Shorthand: ATP - Allocation Transfer Packets.)
Trust builds through consistent quality, and it is scored per role: your trust as a reviewer is tracked separately from your trust as a cook. (Shorthand: T3 - three dimensions: talent, training, temperament.)
Your record follows your presence, which is anchored to a device (called an LCT - Linked Context Token). Good behavior compounds.
Consistent behavior across time, devices, and contexts reveals who's real. Bots and fakes can't sustain coherent patterns. (Shorthand: CI - coherence index.)
Step 1 of 5 · Walkthrough · Story · Concepts · Next StepsYou can pause, scrub, replay, and skip ahead. Nothing is saved and there's no account - you're following a guided walkthrough of the proposed model, not using a product.
This map includes how her story ends. Skip it and press Start above if you would rather find out by driving.
Suspended, not deleted: “death” here means Alice's standing is suspended - she can't act until rebirth - not that her account is deleted; her identity and history persist. The +12 bonus is karma - a head start earned by the trust and reputation she built in her first life, carried forward into her next one. That suspension is what dying cost her, and coming back at all was never guaranteed. How living and dying work →
About that number: in this walkthrough a life starts with 100, and the 12 is what her track record earned on top, so she restarts at 112. How much karma converts is not settled, and 12 is one modelling choice, not the rule. The trust line is open in the same way: the karma page models it as falling at each rebirth, which is not what happens here. Read both lines for the shape (a good track record starts your next life stronger), not the amount.