Social Graph

Social Graph — "the Garden"

Every platform mines the social graph at the user — to target, rank, and sell them. Agora points the same structure back at the community, for the community, in service of its health. It's an optional, off-by-default layer: wire up a Neo4j instance (NEO4J_URI) and the Garden comes alive; leave it unset and nothing in the graph layer runs (every /social/* endpoint cleanly 503s and the admin panels stay hidden).

Full design, ethics, and threat model: docs/SOCIAL-GRAPH.md (the consolidation plan) and docs/AGORA-SOCIAL.md (the condensed design corpus).

The asymmetry principle

Agora's communities skew trans, queer, sex-worker, and recovery — for them graph exposure is a doxxing/outing vector, and mass-reporting is the primary harassment tactic. So every rule bends toward one non-negotiable:

Every possible misreading must land on kindness, never a scarlet letter. Friction only ever dims a node; it never reddens it.

• One public signal: warmth. Loneliness and conflict both render as dim — indistinguishable on purpose, because both mean "bring care here." There is no per-person "bad actor" score, in any view.
• A zoom ladder that is a privacy ladder. ☀️ Community Weather (one project-wide warmth scalar with band + trend) → 🏡 Neighborhood (your own ties only, each rendered by its dyadic brightness — never the friend's global score, which closes the friction side-channel). (✨ Constellation — anonymous cluster blobs — is designed and next.)
• Friction is quarantined and decays. A user report projects a directed FRICTION edge that can only dim an existing tie and fades at a ~14-day half-life; it never creates a tie, and never becomes a per-person verdict.
• One graph, opposite deployments. The same structure serves a vulnerable-population community and a corporation's internal platform, resolved by a per-project social_config tier (community ↔ corporate, admin Settings → Social Graph), not by picking a side.

How it's wired

The scorer owns the write side (it projects INTERACTED / FOLLOWS / CONNECTED / FRICTION edges into Neo4j off the same pgmq queue it scores content on — see Governance), and @agora/api owns the read side (/v7/:projectId/social/*, member/operator-gated, computed live or cached with band hysteresis).

Backing store

The graph runs on DozerDB (a patched Neo4j Community build that re-enables multi-database) with OpenGDS. Setup — plugins, memory tuning, TLS, and the NEO4J_DATABASE selector — is in docs/DOZERDB.md. Enable the subsystem with --profile scorer (see Deployment).

Corporate profile

The corporate-deployment positioning (privacy tiers, what it refuses to do) is in docs/AGORA-CORP.md.