Audience Is Granted Not Computed

A one-hop trust edge gets you the link audience. Nothing gets you acquaintance except the owner handing it to you. And graph distance never raises an audience: two hops is not half of link, it is nothing.

Why this is the whole thing

"No central trust score" is easy to agree with and easy to lose. You lose it the moment friend-of-friend leaks in at a reduced tier, because at that point distance has become a currency: every player's incentive turns into edge farming, and you have built a score with extra steps and no dial to turn it off.

So the ladder is not a gradient over the graph. It is a set of grants.

The ladder

• public — title, kind, marker, and coarse geography only
• link — adds the wiki slug, the rite, the trail, the time, and exact geography
• acquaintance — adds the note
• private — the pin is absent, not blank

Quest pins cap one rung tighter no matter who asks, because a quest pin says what you were doing, not just where you were.

A closed allow-list, not a strip-list

The projection starts empty and copies in only named fields. This is not a stylistic preference. A strip-list leaks by omission: the day somebody adds a device model to the record, it ships — and a test written against a strip-list still passes, because it only knows about the fields it was told to remove.

The property that keeps it honest bolts a junk field onto a record and asserts it never surfaces at any audience. That test is unwritable against a strip-list. Inverting the list is what made the property expressible, and the property is worth more than the ten lines it cost.

Related: A Wiki Fork Is Not An Audience, which is about the rung this ladder does not have.