Changes from v0.1.4:

• People Search: Rolodex brings private member search to communities. Each community has it's own Rolodex for members to discover other like-minded members. Community builders use Rolodex to make introductions and engage on relevant topics.

  

• Community-specific profiles: Custom forms for members to share contextual information with each community. Members reveal facets of their personality with different groups, mirroring IRL information sharing.

• Cross-Community Search: Search across all your communities together. Find someone to help you solve your current problem, or get introduced to someone, with one search.

  

• Live Communities: Rolodex is live for five thriving communities: FBI, Haberdashery, Tokyowip, Creole Network, and Decentralised.Co.

  

One more thing: Social utilities on Rolodex

Autofollow is a social utility built on Rolodex for a specific people search use-case. Connect your Rolodex to discover people from your communities on Farcaster.

Leveraging your Rolodex community memberships, Autofollow suggests profiles to follow on Farcaster. Shoutout to Harsh from our community for shipping this within 2 weeks!

Sign up for your community rolodex here. We are currently onboarding Telegram groups, Discord servers and Farcaster channels to Rolodex.

Want to try it out first? Log in with a Farcaster account here to join the Creole Network Rolodex. Works best on any desktop browser.

Online networks are prone to attacks defrauding existing users or creating fake accounts to spread misinformation. This is an age-old problem.

Sybil resistance has been a research topic since the advent of the internet and online networks. Current approaches combine to give us a good enough solution to the problem.

With the introduction of broad generative AI tools, the problem multiplies.

The barrier to creating new accounts is dropping, “deep fakes” are about to become cheaper than “mechanical turks”. The defence spam filters provide against bot-generated content is likely to fail soon.

A recent example of deep fakes breaking the liveness test.

How can we distinguish humans from a machine?

Current techniques applicable for different use cases are described below:

• Reverse Turing Test presents AI-hard problems as a challenge (e.g. Captcha) to users. Newer tests such as the "FLIP" test work on human-generated questions instead of algorithmic challenges.

• Pseudonymous Party is a physical or virtual gathering for elaborate authentication through "liveness".

• Intersectional Identity bridges formal verification and informal mechanisms to confirm identity-related claims. It extends the “Web of Trust” by including markers such as education, location, work etc., intersecting with real-world activities.

• Web of Trust consists of identity certificates validated through the digital signatures of other users. This is an OG approach and base for many techniques since the 90s.

• Token Curated Registries are incentive systems designed to replace list owners by creating economic incentives for decentralised list curation. Registry members hold tokens, which increase in value if the quality, legitimacy and popularity of the list increases. This incentivises good behaviour to be on the list.

• Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) need human decision-making in their functioning. Their activities model 'human entropy', observable on-chain and serve as a meaningful substrate for Proof of Personhood solutions.

Segregating humans from machines sometimes requires certainty of uniqueness.

The unique-human problem: Proof-of-personhood

Proof-of-personhood is finding a way to assert that a given registered account is controlled by a real person (and a different real person from every other registered account), ideally without revealing which real person it is - Vitalik

Current initiatives use a combination of these approaches. e.g. Aadhar, Bright ID, Circles, Idena, Proof of Humanity, Worldcoin

Such systems allow one-person-one-vote semantics. Incentive mechanisms that reward good behaviour and promote anti-plutocracy. UBI (universal basic income) token is an approach that most projects use today.

The Identity Spectrum

Users play different roles in online ecosystems, through various personas.

On Reddit and other pseudonymous networks, reputation is built by contributing, engaging and supporting the community. Different guarantees are required to take part in different networks.

Proof-of-personhood is important to verify that participating users are unique (tied to real-world identity).

Biometric proof-of-personhood at scale can inhibit privacy, or be too opaque or centralised. Users must be free to be pseudonymous or anonymous, or self-assert or socially confirm their identity, in networks that do not need uniqueness.

“A social-graph-based system bootstrapped off tens of millions of biometric ID holders, however, could actually work.” - Vitalik.

A social-graph based approach nuances identity in various contexts, acting as a middle layer between biometric (and other) identity systems and the user’s application layer.

At Shovel, we are building a user-controlled data store and social graph protocol to enable privacy-preserving trust systems for use cases requiring verified identity.

References

• What do I think about biometric proof of personhood? - Vitalik

• Decentralized Identity Trilemma

• Idena Flip Challenge: AI-resistant CAPTCHA.

• The Identity Spectrum - Identity Woman

• Who watches the Watchmen - Radicalxchange

• Social Identity - Radicalxchange

• AntiSybil - BrightID

• Intersectional Social Data - Radicalxchange

We onboarded the first user to Rolo/dex on 18th October. We have worked with amazing early believers over the past month to improve it.

Here's a snapshot of the capabilities of Rolo/dex v0.1.4:

• Add new contacts from your network to Rolo/dex individually

• Import contacts from Apple and Google (all iOS contacts, most recent 200 Google contacts)

• Add tags, socials, text notes and other weblinks to contacts

• Search across all text (tags, links, notes) to find the contact you're looking for

• Archive irrelevant or obsolete contacts to declutter your contact book

• Sync data across devices and browser instances or export it to own a copy of your data

Rolo/dex Alpha: Local-First and Secure

The Rolo/dex alpha webapp is designed to be local-first and cryptographically tied to your device browser. This means that we do not store or have access to your data. Your data is stored locally on your device, and an encrypted copy is stored on a server for syncing across multiple devices.

Additionally, Rolo/dex supports passwordless sign-up and authentication on the browser, and provides secure account recovery across your devices.

What's on the horizon

We're thrilled with the progress we've made so far, but we're not stopping there. Here's a glimpse of what we’re considering for Rolo/dex v0.2:

• Improving relationship management with reminders, smarter tags and views

• Persona Profiles with links

• Kickstarting the Rolo/dex network

A huge shoutout to our amazing community for shaping Rolo/dex. We are carefully increasing the alpha users.

If you're keen to give it a shot then you can sign up for the waitlist here. Rolo/dex currently works best on Chrome on your desktop.

We plan to open up the public beta soon, so stay tuned for more updates. In the meantime, please don't hesitate to share your thoughts, suggestions, or feedback in the comments below or write to me at rishi@shovel.company

August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee announced the “WorldWideWeb” to a newsgroup called alt.hypertext. He wrote -

“The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere.”

The WorldWideWeb project had 4 key components - HTML, HTTP, Browser and a Server. It was the beginning of a revolution. Soon, people around the world started extending the core ideas of the project.

In 1993, building on Tim Berners-Lee’s initial browser prototype, a team at the National Center of Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) decided to implement their version. With that, the first popular browser was born: NCSA Mosaic.

While WorldWideWeb had a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, with Mosaic you could only open and browse HTML pages. All the editing features disappeared in this browser. It introduced the URL bar which wasn't visible in WorldWideWeb. You could only open the HTML sources (via the view source feature) or via an external editor application.

Mosaic influenced the long-term future of web browsers and the influence is visible even in today's browser UI. It was very early days for the Web and it was a read-only medium. HTTP had no spec and it just supported GET method.

Web2.0 - WebDAV

HTTP/1.0 became a formal RFC in 1996. At the same time, Jim Whitehead - a PhD student from the University of Irvine - started working with W3C on the problem of, “distributed authoring”. The original vision of the web involved the mediums of both reading and writing. Jim and several other like-minded people wanted to break the limitations of Web 1.0, which was read-only, and move towards Web 2.0; which would be both read & write.

This led to the creation of “Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning” (WebDAV a.k.a DAV) as a set of extensions to HTTP. Jim wrote -

"WebDAV is extending HTTP to provide a standard infrastructure for asynchronous collaborative authoring across the Internet. The WebDAV extensions support the use of HTTP for interoperable publishing of a variety of content, providing a common interface to many types of repositories and making the Web analogous to a large-grain, network-accessible file system.”

WebDAV had a filesystem view of the internet. The WebDAV protocol provides a framework for users to create, change and move documents on a server. The most important features include the maintenance of properties about an author or modification date, namespace management, collections, and overwrite protection.

The vision of WebDAV was huge and the protocol working group took a phased approach. It became an Internet standard in 1999, the first RFC focused on “distributed authoring”. WebDAV extended HTTP to introduce new methods like LOCK/UNLOCK/MKCOL etc for easier design of the servers. This approach moved most of the heavy lifting to the protocol layer and standardised the interfaces for servers. Right from its inception, WebDAV received great reception, and Microsoft Office 2000 was shipping it.

The next RFC of protocol focused on the “versioning”. They set out to build protocol by improving the design of CVS (Concurrent version systems) - which was the dominant version control system of the time. The chosen design was server-first in nature, without even a local checkout of files. Iterations continued on WebDAV till 2007 and a total of 5 RFCs focused on various aspects of protocol.

The design choice of extending HTTP and introducing new methods eventually turned out to be its limitation. Companies building APIs focused on basic features of HTTP/1.1 and ended up their own proprietary ways of updating data on the servers. People who were looking for some sanity in API design settled on REST (2005) which was a more convention-driven way of building APIs than a protocol.

This was the end of WebDAV becoming a general-purpose protocol, but it found adoption in specific problems. Personal information management (PIM) category products like calendars, notes & address books adopted it. It became a base layer for other successful protocols working on data interoperability like CardDAV (address book protocol) and CalDAV (calendaring protocol).

CalDAV (2007) and CardDAV (2011) were both led by Cyrus Daboo, from Apple. Apple being a hardware-first company, had a more “synchronisation” layer view of the cloud - not so different from the emerging “Local-first” paradigm. Google also adopted these protocols for their ecosystem, although they also offered alternative proprietary APIs for the same data. Both protocols have been very successful, providing a foundation for the App ecosystem. Yet far from the original vision of WebDAV for the end-users.

In the world of APIs, a lot of interoperability is sacrificed. Tim Berners-Lee, since 1999 has talked about the idea of the “Semantic Web”. It would make Internet data machine-readable and interoperability standards to enable context-understanding programs to intelligently select information for users. In 2006, he mentioned Semantic Web to be an essential part of Web3.0 but, it never took off.

Web3 - IPFS

In 2008, Bitcoin was invented. It was the first practical application of blockchain technology, and it started a new technological movement. This movement was later termed “Web3” by the Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood in 2014. It also became an umbrella term for the revival of old ideas of improving the web. Decentralisation & interoperability became the ideas of the movement.

Juan Bennet built the “Inter-planetary File System” (IPFS) in 2014. IPFS was another attempt at building a global distributed file system. Instead of extending HTTP - like WebDAV - It set out to be an alternative to HTTP for several data distribution use cases.

IPFS was heavily influenced by the version control system - Git, due to its decentralised design. Linus Torvalds created Git in 2005. He was looking for a decentralised version control system for managing the development of Linux. He mentioned -

”In many ways you can just see git as a filesystem—it's content-addressable, and it has a notion of versioning”.

IPFS took the idea of “content-addressing” and redefined the URLs to point to data rather than location which keeps data. Making data available over a globally decentralised address space.

It is very early days for IPFS and Web3. Most of Web3's adoption has come from “Wild West” style cryptocurrency projects. IPFS has seen adoption for “permanent web” hosting use cases, like running Wikipedia mirrors, and also immutable hyperlinks in blockchain records, like NFT.

Browsers are showing interest in using IPFS and the famous toolkit - Curl, recently added support for IPFS.

Internet as a File System

Many new perspectives of the “future of the internet” are popping up and gaining mainstream momentum like “Internet computer”, “Personal cloud”, “local-first” etc. All of them are quite similar as they are working towards the same vision of “decentralising web”.

Platforms of Web2.0 are the largest as they have ever been and the APIs are “server-first” in nature. As the design of the Web is moving forward, we are looking to bake in “Credible-exit” for the end-users. Currently, data for end-users is locked in by the vendors.

Government regulations like GDPR, have forced companies to provide a solution to this problem. As a result, we are seeing “export as a zip” options on several platforms, which is largely useless for the majority of end-users.

This is where a file system which supports interoperability between the apps becomes extremely critical to the design of the web. It allows end-user a “right to exit”, while increasing “ease of doing business”.

We believe many protocols will emerge on top of such a file system to solve problems around specific data types. At Shovel, we are accelerating this future by designing an address book protocol for this world.

Sources

• https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1991/08/art-6484.txt

• https://techno-barje.fr/post/2023/10/20/history-of-edition-and-publishing-in-web-browsers/

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebDAV

• https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~ejw/papers/webdav_intro_ic.pdf

• http://www.webdav.org/deltav/WWW10/deltav-www10.pdf

• http://www.dsc.ufcg.edu.br/~garcia/cursos/dglobal_software/Textos_Sem/Future of Distributed Software Development.htm

• https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/what-is-ipfs/

• https://github.com/ipfs/papers/raw/master/ipfs-cap2pfs/ipfs-p2p-file-system.pdf

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git