The human.json Protocol
3 days ago
- #human-verification
- #web-protocol
- #trust-network
- human.json is a protocol for asserting human authorship of website content and vouching for others.
- It uses a human.json file linked in the HTML head to declare human authorship and trust other sites.
- The protocol establishes a trust network where sites vouch for each other, creating a crawlable web of human-verified content.
- Browser extensions help identify human-maintained sites with visual indicators based on trust levels (green, yellow, orange).
- The human.json schema includes version, URL, and optional vouches with URLs and dates.
- Trust is transitive, starting from a trusted seed and extending through vouches up to a configurable number of hops.
- URL matching is prefix-based, and normalization rules ensure consistent identity verification.
- Verification involves crawling the trust graph while respecting robots.txt, caching, and HTTP standards.
- The protocol is in draft status, with contributions and feedback encouraged for further development.