paulwalkExperimenting with `human.json` - a protocol to declare your allegiance to the human race ;-)
https://www.paulwalk.net/2026/experimenting-with-human.json/
(hat tip to @cogdog )
herbert@hvdsomp @cogdog It's the chain of trust created by the "vouches" idea I think. So, you start with someone that you actually know and trust and work from there, in a series of "hops".
I'm not convinced that this is viable to be honest - as you say, it seems like it would nonetheless be open to bing corrupted.
But I am interested to see such attempts emerging - and it's easy to experiment with. Also - it's a statement - even if others make the same claim insincerely.
Mike Taylor 🦕@mike @hvdsomp @cogdog Yes - agreed that they will try to do this. And, moreover, people will *claim* their website is written by their (human) self, when they actually use some LLM to "draft" it.
But I think this experiment is about establishing "trust" relationships between websites. Maybe closer in spirit to the "blog roll" idea - semi-automated.
Again - I'm not at all sure this is viable - but I've become very interested in how we can identify human-generated content in The Age of Slop.
@paulwalk @mike @cogdog I see the value of human.json in its curatorial aspect. In that sense it’s similar to Wander (https://codeberg.org/susam/wander#readme) and Kagi Small Web (https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb). I am not so sure about its value to distinguish between human and AI created sites.
Alan is @cogdog 🇨🇦
Graham K@paulwalk @cogdog @hvdsomp I think it’s a bit like the PGP web of trust, with publishing on some web site substituting for the key signing party. For an individual, I would expect a way to seed trust with “I believe that these X web sites are published by real and trustworthy people. I could imagine a rapid trust fall-off with increasing degrees of separation.
I wonder if its power might be improved by also supporting negative assertions?
@hvdsomp @cogdog @paulwalk Yes, that sounds plausible to me.
Coincidentally (?), this just drifted by in my feed: https://cloudisland.nz/@coderanger/116276210205575304
Noah K (@[email protected])
I don't mean to be a killjoy but "vouching for trusted people" is not a scalable way to build a software ecosystem. I was there, I ran signing parties, I was a CAcert assurer, I've got a strong-set GPG key in a hardware token, none of it worked beyond the most fringe of the fringe dorks. You get a few ossified relationships between major public figures and a small ring of friends around each, and then your permissions are effectively locked down forever. Do you want to live in the world where you need to have a million followers to launch a new framework? The ecosystem we've all been building in and on top of for decades is so deeply permeated by "assume good intent" at all levels that I'm not sure people are ready for the velocity reduction that is coming after the next few claw-based JiaTans. The first one will be an oddity, but eventually we're going to have to grapple with buying huge vertically integrated dev stacks from Trusted Vendors™ or we make everything from scratch again.
@gklyne @hvdsomp @cogdog @coderanger that's interesting. I don't share the implicit assumption that this is supposed to scale, or be a general solution. I see it as "local" & personal
@paulwalk @hvdsomp @coderanger @cogdog
Yes, me too. I think that getting away from the need to scale everything to the hilt is a highly desirable goal.
FWIW, I’m working on a project with a friend that is attempting to do something like this for grassroots cultural events. In this case, it is the events themselves, and the people involved, that provide a basis for a locally “owned” online community. See: https://test.culturereverb.co.uk/
@gklyne @paulwalk @coderanger @cogdog I seem to remember @judell was recently mentioning an effort that sounded like it had similar goals
@paulwalk @cogdog @coderanger @judell @hvdsomp I think Blaine Cook had joined a group doing some community level web presence - https://newpublic.org/
Jon Udell
Tom Renner