Understanding Your Community's Trust Graph

Every community on karmyq builds a trust graph over time. Each completed help exchange, endorsement, and karma interaction adds to the bond between two members. The Trust Graph tab makes those bonds visible.

How to Access It

Open any community you belong to and click the Trust Graph tab in the community navigation. You'll find two sub-tabs: Community and My Network. Your dashboard also has a Your Trust Network panel with a People / Communities toggle.

One visual language (Sprint 79)

All trust-graph views now share one look so an intuition learned in one carries to the next:

• Every node is the same size. Node size no longer encodes trust, so it can't mislead — you read structure (who clusters together, who bridges groups), not dot size.
• You are enlarged and white-ringed as a "you are here" anchor.
• Your connections are amber. Every line touching your node is highlighted so you can find yourself in the wider network.
• One trust number. A node's trust score is the decayed current strength of its relationships — the same value in every view.

Community View

The Community tab shows every member of your community arranged on a circle, grouped by how closely they're connected. Edges bundle together when they follow similar paths through the network — a technique called hierarchical edge bundling. The result reveals the community's structure at a glance.

What you see:

• Nodes on the circle are community members, grouped into clusters by their strongest connections.
• Bright, bundled edges within a group are strong, active relationships — the dense core of a sub-community.
• Thin, muted threads crossing between groups are weak connections — the ties that would break first in a split.
• Amber edges are your connections.

Groups are detected automatically from the strongest connections, so the layout reflects how the community actually clusters rather than any imposed structure.

My Network View

The My Network tab shows your first-degree network within this community — the people you've built trust with here — clustered by how closely they connect to each other. It's a static, structure-revealing view; click any node to open its detail panel (trust score, karma, connection count).

Your Trust Network (dashboard)

The dashboard panel toggles between two views of your trust:

• People — your trust network aggregated across all your communities, in the same clustered ego style as My Network.
• Communities — the inter-community depth view (below).

Communities (depth) View

Each community is a node, sized by membership. Two kinds of links connect them:

• Organic ties (solid, slate). Accrued automatically as members exchange help across community lines — a sign two communities are genuinely intertwined. Thicker = stronger.
• Fission lineage (dashed, violet). Parent → child links left behind when a community splits. This is how you trace a community's family tree after a fission.

Your own communities are emerald and white-ringed; communities you can see but aren't a member of are indigo. Click any community for its member count and status.

Reading Edge Strength

Edge thickness and opacity tell you how alive a relationship currently is:

• Thick, bright edge — active recently. The trust bond is strong.
• Thin, faded edge — exists but hasn't been reinforced in a while. The bond is weakening.
• Very faint thread — near the disappearance threshold. Without a new interaction it will eventually be removed by the nightly cleanup.

Strength is computed from the interaction half-life. A single exchange fades to half-strength after about 30 days. Repeated interactions build stability, extending the relationship's half-life significantly — a relationship built on 10+ exchanges has a half-life measured in months to years.

See Interaction Half-Life for a full explanation of how trust decays and stabilizes.

What Drives Trust?

Four interaction types contribute to trust bonds:

Interaction	Weight
Completed help exchange	10
Endorsement	5
Karma given	3
Shared event	2

Older interactions contribute less than recent ones — trust bonds reflect current relationships, not just historical ones. The trust score you see is the decayed total, so active trust is what counts.

Fission Split View

When your community has an active fission proposal, the trust graph shows the same circular, bundled layout — but cluster assignment comes from the proposed split groups rather than automatic detection. Members are color-coded by their proposed group (blue = Group A, orange = Group B, gray = unassigned).

• Green edges are strong within-group connections — relationships that stay intact after the split.
• Red threads are cross-group connections — the contested relationships that span the proposed boundary and make a split costly.
• A dashed ring marks members with no trust connections yet.

Click any member to see their trust score and connections. If you're an admin, you can move them between the proposed groups from the panel below the graph.

Trust-Gated Governance

The trust graph powers community governance. Members with high enough trust scores become eligible for governance roles (Admin, Moderator). Eligible members can be nominated and ratified through the Governance tab on any community page.

See Trust-Gated Governance for the full governance model.