Mycorrizhae, a vision for tying it all together
A thesis statement for a post-platform web.
Mycorrhizae (working title) is a community identity and data store designed below the level of the platform. It provides a way for village-scale groups to manage and maintain identity and membership, and interface with a wide variety of data and social protocols.
The core concepts of the Mycorrhizae is the ID and the Graph.
ID
A person expresses themselves into the space of the Mycorhizae. The Mycorhizae provides them with credentials and an identity in the form of a domain URL, like “id.example.com”
The issued credentials are used to add and edit the Graph.
The Graph
Once someone has an ID with Mycorrhizae, they have a Graph. The Graph contains all the data associated with the ID.
The Graph is a collection of Resources, which take the form of a URL. A resource with the URL “https://id.example.com/resource” contains some structured data, perhaps something like “hello: ‘Nikolas’.
Resources can be read and edited by the ID they belong to, but they can also allow anyone without an ID to read and write them, or they can give this access to specified IDs.
Use Your ID
Applications outside of the Mycorhizae may need you to log in. You can log in to these applications with the credentials of your Mycorrhizae ID.
Use The Graph
Once you’ve logged in to an application with your Mycorhizae credentials, the application can use your Graph.
The Graph is a personal data store. Applications store data here, not within their own boundaries.
Plurality
There are lots of different ways to make this structure happen. Mycorrhizae is an open door.
Open ID Connect and oAuth2 are standard ways to provide identities.
Solid Protocol is a standard way to associate an ID with a personal data store, and manage permissions on that data store.
Authenticated Transfer Protocol is another way to create a Persona Data Store that belongs to an ID.
Activity Pub is a way for IDs to communicate with each other via their personal data stores.
Gemini and DAT are ways to expose and deliver resources on a personal data store.
Mycorrhizae does not exclude any protocol, and can expand to work with any of them.