2026-09-05 human.json
=====================

I maintain a feed aggregator that is used to generate a static web
site. That is, you subscribe to some feeds and run my program to
download the feeds and generate a HTML file.

Typically, if all the feeds are on a certain topic, this is called a
"planet". I also maintain such a planet for role-playing games: RPG
Planet. If you use it for a bunch of blogs you're interested in, you
could call it a blog roll. I have one of these as well, although it's
badly maintained: Blogs.

As you can tell, these sites look a bit weird. This is on purpose:

> New items appear at the top and old items disappear at the bottom.
> When it’s gone, it’s gone. There is no count of unread items. The
> goal is to fight the fear of missing out (FOMO).
>
> Each item looks similar to every other: headline, link, an extract,
> maybe a date and an author. Extracts contain but the beginning of
> the article’s text; all markup is removed; no images. The goal is to
> make the page easy to skim. Scroll down until you find something
> interesting and follow the link to the original article if you want
> to read it.

I like this a lot.

The question is, however, where to get the subscription list from. I
edit the OPML files by hand. If you visit the two sites linked above,
you'll find a link to the files in case you want to import them all
into your preferred feed reader. I don't recommend this, however.
Whenever I have tried it, I have been overwhelmed and ended up
deleting them all again. This is one of the reasons my personal
subscription list is so badly maintained.

Recently, however, I learned about the human.json project by
@contact@robida.net from @ploum@mamot.fr. It describes a file you can
add to your website. The idea is that you do this if you are a human
and you "vouch" for other humans by linking to them. If you do this,
and you install the browser extension, sites "in your network" of
humans get a kind of semaphore light:

🟢 Green — directly trusted or 1 hop away
🟡 Yellow — 2 hops
🟠 Orange — 3+ hops
🔵 Blue — has human.json but not in your trust graph yet
⚪ Gray — not participating

Of course there are questions. Scammers will put up such files,
eventually. But the web of trust is there and I like that.

And here's what I did today: I added a feature to my program so that
you can point it to a site like your own and it will traverse the
graph for up to 2 hops (the first two items on the list above) and
check if there's a feed to be found. If so, the feed is written to an
OPML file.

And now you can use the OPML file to subscribe to all your friends (1
hop) and friends of friends (2 hops). And you can do that for a
community of web nerds and run a "planet" based on this friend of a
friend system.

I think it's neat.

Of course it's not for everybody. There's a reason FOAF didn't go
anywhere. That was a way to note who your friends were. Listing your
friends is a bit cringe. Listing your friends is also doxxing
yourself. It makes you an easy victim of network analysis. This can be
troublesome if you're an activist. Look around. The surveillance bros
of the entire world are waiting to gobble up this information. But if
you're using the fediverse you're already following people. If you
have a public blogroll, you're already announcing to the world a part
of your network is. You're already dancing like nobody is watching.
Fuck the surveillance bros! Awoooooo!

Anyway. The program I maintain is called Planet Jupiter :jupiter: and
it stands in the tradition of software such as Planet Venus, Planet
Pluto and others. This one is mine and it's written in Perl. 😅

#Jupiter