---------------------------------------- Friend of a friend of a frie... May 31st, 2020 ---------------------------------------- It is not important how it went, but I recently had a short discussion on IRC about users having several accounts spread throughout the tildeverse. Why you'd need to is currently beyond me. But it got me thinking; with users spread all around the place, with phlogs, blogs and glogs (a little gemini-joke) in different places, and connections, both friends and services intertwined through it all, wouldn't it be cool if we had a way of cataloging it all? We could have a world readable file detailing our accounts and the services we use, maybe even in a machine-readable format, so that we could build cool crawlers that may traverse this insanity and visualize it in ways never known to man, and bring us all closer together, like the organic mess that we are. Sounds familiar? I thought so. My brain virtually itched, before it hit me: FOAF! You may even have thought about it all the time while reading this, you sly devil, you. What can I say, we're nerds, we've heard of things. If you haven't heard about it, FOAF[0], or; "Friend of a Friend, a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities, and relations to other people and objects" (lifted more or less entirely from wikipedia[1]). There's also an article from 2004 at The Guardian[3] about it, but it's mostly interesting from a historical perspective. FOAF is simply a file that stores pieces of information about you in some structured manner. Typically it's an rdf, or even json-ld file, apparently. I won't go into the specs right now, but you may for instance say something along the lines of "My name is sndr, and I use these services, where my username is this. These are my emails (though they are hashed so you may confirm that an adress is mine, without me receiving any spam). These are my friends, and their sites are at this place, their FOAF-file is here, so you may look at it at your own discretion." Obviously the FOAF-files are *way* more structured, with Agents, SeeAlsos, and Persons and Groups, and whatnot. FOAF have been around for quite some time, but it never caught on. And if I were a speculatin' man, I'd guess that have something to do with my thoughs when I discovered it years ago: "Cool! But what is it for?" While I *now* see the appeal with something like FOAF, where you have a real decentralized network of people, the truth is it's not meant for, well, people. You don't *need* software to parse it, but reading basically xml for hours on end, probably gets quite old, quite fast. Not to mention writing it. I'll admit, I have neither read the specs entirely nor fully understood all the parts I have read. But I *do* wonder if you could build a sort of tree of relations with the current features of FOAF, or if you'd need an extension of some sort. Say if tilde.team had a file in the webroot, that basically say "I am not a person, but here are a set of my users, and here are their relations-file. I am related to tilde.club in some way, and here are it's relations-file." And I could have one such relations-file, under *my* webroot, that say "I am a person, this is my name. I am a user of tilde.team. I have an account on this server too. This is my nick in this irc-server. These are my friends, and their files are here." I'll have to actually get to grips with the specs. And then think some more. I don't know, maybe I'm just describing finger. A cool finger. -- [0]http://FOAF-project.org [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(software) [3]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2004/feb/19/newmedia.media