March 8, 2026
Web of trust or web of LOLs?
The human.json Protocol
human.json says “I’m human”; commenters roll eyes and yell “virtue signal”
TLDR: A new “human.json” file lets sites declare “real human here” and vouch for others, with a browser add‑on showing trust dots. Commenters mostly roast it as easy to fake and old‑school FOAF vibes, calling it virtue signaling rather than a real fix for AI‑generated content.
Can a tiny text file prove you’re not a robot? That’s the pitch behind human.json, a simple file you post on your website claiming “a real person wrote this,” plus optional vouches for other sites you trust. A browser add‑on promises colored dots—green, yellow, orange—to show how close a site is to someone you trust. Think a web of recommendations, not passwords.
Cue the comments section going full theater. The top vibe is skeptic mode: GaryBluto shrugs that this will be used by “a handful of people who were already friends,” basically a small‑club badge, not an internet fix. Others flashbacks to early‑web nostalgia, calling it a riff on FOAF—that old “friend of a friend” network from the 2000s that never quite took off.
Then came the jokes. orsorna deadpanned, “Too bad they didn’t choose a more human interchange format,” poking fun at using JSON (a developer data format) to prove humanity. The claws came out when ai‑psychopath pointed to “50 commits in 24 hours” and quipped that an anti‑AI protocol looks like “AI slop” itself. And deafpolygon dropped the mic: “Virtue signaling at best; noise at worst”, warning that bots can copy‑paste this file just as easily as humans.
So while the idea aims for a trust web, the crowd sees a vibes badge that savvy scammers will mimic. Fans of the indie web may give it a spin, but the court of public opinion? Mostly memes, side‑eyes, and “nice idea, won’t scale.”
Key Points
- •human.json (version 0.1.1, draft) lets site owners assert human authorship and vouch for other sites.
- •Sites advertise human.json via an HTML <link rel="human-json">; the file contains a canonical URL and optional vouches.
- •Verifiers fetch page HTML, resolve the link, and validate the JSON; vouches include ISO 8601 dates.
- •Browser extensions indicate trust proximity (green 0–1 hops, yellow 2, orange 3+), and manage trusted/vouched sites.
- •The file must be served with Content-Type: application/json and CORS Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *; no fixed file path required.