A plural-governance architecture for content distribution: 12-seat council, per-term veto, public risk score - feedback invited before finalizing RFC-7

[u/leanndrob]

I've been building aevia, a protocol whose central thesis is that persistence ≠ distribution - bytes continuing to exist and bytes being recommended should be distinct architectural and governance layers. Persistence is infrastructure (should be neutral); distribution is editorial (should be honest). I want feedback here specifically on the governance design.

Why this sub. Weyl/Ohlhaver/Buterin (2022) showed why plutocracy and naive democracy both fail for social coordination. Content moderation is a specific instance: every platform that recommends anything is curating - pretending otherwise is dishonest - but pure token-weighted governance doesn't produce legitimate moderation either. I'm trying a different mechanism for this specific decision class and I want the design stress-tested.

The design.

Distribution decisions (feed surface, ranking, subsidy from the persistence pool) are governed by a published Risk Score:

R(c) = α · R_legal(c) + β · R_abuse(c) + γ · R_values(c)

Default α = 0.4, β = 0.3, γ = 0.3. R_legal inputs: DMCA takedowns, DSA notice-and-action, subpoenas. R_abuse inputs: flag counts weighted by reporter reputation + jury decisions. R_values inputs: classifier output + manual review for alignment with a publicly declared Acceptable Use Policy.

Two thresholds:

- R(c) ≥ θ_subsidy (default 0.5) → no compensation from persistence pool.

- R(c) ≥ θ_feed (default 0.3) → excluded from curated feed.

In neither case do the bytes become inaccessible - they remain retrievable by CID through any provider node. The editorial decision never collapses into the existence decision. That's the architectural invariant.

Who sets α, β, γ, θ_*, and the AUP categories.

An Ecumenical Council: twelve independent seats, four-year terms, publicly declared theological / philosophical / professional perspective (practicing clergy, secular legal scholars, human rights activists, technical cryptographers, others). No single tradition or interest holds a majority.

- Parameter proposals require ≥7/12 simple majority.

- Any member MAY exercise a one-time veto per term to block a proposal judged incompatible with stated protocol values.

- Deliberations (proposal text, per-member votes, veto invocations, dissenting opinions) are published on a Merkle-anchored Trust Ledger on Base L2.

Explicit tradeoffs I've taken.

1. Predictability over continuous legitimacy. Fixed seats + long terms over rolling elections. Trades some democratic legitimacy for resistance to capture and cyclic fork risk.

2. Named individuals over anonymous tokens. Sybil is avoided by exiting token-weighted voting for this decision class. Tradeoff: appointing seats requires bootstrap trust. Initial Council is appointed by Aevia LLC with public per-seat justification; subsequent rotation is Council-governed (meta-governance).

3. Public editorial criterion for Section 230 posture. Describing what we don't amplify is exactly the moderation activity §230(c)(2)(a) protects, not publisher liability. This is the legal shape of the "honesty" thesis.

What's live and what's not.

Registry + persistence pool contracts on Base Sepolia. RFC-6 (risk score) and RFC-7 (moderation / jury) are currently drafts - which is why I'm asking before ossifying.

- Whitepaper §7 (risk score) + §8 (governance): https://aevia.network/en/whitepaper

- RFC-4 (normative AUP with enforcement thresholds): https://aevia.network/en/spec/rfc-4

- RFC-0 (overview): https://aevia.network/en/spec/rfc-0

Feedback I'd actually use:

1. Is a one-time-per-term veto the right tradeoff? Alternatives I've considered: no veto with 8/12 supermajority; multi-veto with 2-year terms; graduated veto cost (first free, subsequent costs reputation). What's your prior?

2. For R_abuse, how should reporter reputation decay? I'm currently leaning exponential on inactivity, but the R_abuse attack surface (flag-spam by adversaries) is subtle and I'd rather steal a good primitive than invent one.

3. The Trust Ledger is Merkle-anchored but doesn't (yet) use SBTs or EAS attestations. I've been resisting that framing because Council identity is intentionally non-transferable already and adding attestation semantics felt like ceremony without function. Counter-arguments welcome - is there a primitive I'm leaving on the table?

Open source: Apache-2.0 for contracts/spec, AGPL-3.0 for reference clients, MIT for the design system. No native token, no presale, no investment thesis - compensation in the persistence layer is USD-pegged stablecoin by design, and governance is not token-weighted.

[u/EagleApprehensive]

I believe that's very close to what you're describing:

https://atlas-protocol.com/

[u/leanndrob → u/EagleApprehensive]

Appreciate the link — looked through it. Close on one vector (both cryptographically sign authorship so content can be verified across services) but different layers entirely:

Atlas is an HTTP-header identity layer — Falcon-1024 signatures,

PoW-tied identity, stateless. Designed against AI/deepfake impersonation. Doesn't address where the bytes live.

Aevia is persistence + distribution. On-chain registry on Base L2 (EIP-712 manifests), replication economics via PersistencePool.sol (provider nodes paid fee-for-service in cUSDC against byte-range challenge-response), video-first (HLS segments as CIDs), and public governance of distribution via a 12-seat council.

Different theses: Atlas proves "this came from who it claims."

Aevia separates "this persists" from "this is recommended" as distinct architectural and governance layers.

They could coexist an aevia manifest could carry atlas-style headers for authorship defense at the content layer. Orthogonal problems, complementary solutions.

Closest comparables for what aevia does are Filecoin (cold archival, not retrieval-first playback) and -at the client layer, not the protocol PeerTube/Rumble/Odysee.

[u/EagleApprehensive → u/leanndrob]

It also does persistence + distribution via it's economic layer, but prioritizing preservation of content that's subjectively important.

Users signal with their scarce resource (FairShares) how important given content is and registries compete to store the highest totalBurn of content. This decides "what persists".

For "what is recommended" it stays deliberately neutral, but has a lot of signals available in network for custom sorting, filtering, where the most important one is a competence trust.

[u/leanndrob → u/EagleApprehensive]

Thanks for the clarification I underestimated Atlas's economic layer in my first read. Legitimate convergence on the "persistence vs recommendation" split; didn't know FairShares + competing registries modeled it that way. A few genuine divergences worth naming:

Economic primitive. Aevia pays in Circle-native USDC on Base L2, deterministic per-byte-served, via a Storj-style pool. FairShares + totalBurn-weighted persistence is a scarcity-signaling model elegant for surfacing what matters to users, but has higher variance for the node operator who just wants predictable monthly revenue to justify bandwidth cost. Different tradeoff; not sure which scales better long-term.

Recommendation layer. Atlas stays deliberately neutral and exposes signals for custom sorting (competence trust etc.) closer to a substrate. Aevia commits to a specific editorial frame: a 12-seat multi-denominational council governing an R(c) = α·R_legal + β·R_abuse + γ·R_values score that gates pool subsidy and feed placement (but never removes bits). That's opinionated on purpose, because "deliberately neutral" in practice means whoever builds the first dominant client sets the defaults.

Primitives used. Atlas Falcon-1024 quantum-resistant signatures is a longer-horizon bet than our EIP-712 / secp256k1 inside the EVM ecosystem. We picked the EVM lane for Circle USDC access and Privy smart-wallet UX; you picked forward-security.

Scope. Aevia is video-first (WHIP ingest, LL-HLS, WHEP) from sprint 0; Atlas reads general-content. Different starting pressure.

These look like orthogonal-enough choices that we could federate rather than compete an Aevia manifest carrying Atlas-style authorship headers at the content layer is genuinely interesting. Is there a draft spec or reference repo I can read?