Many of the best things on the internet were created by humans. Indeed, I would be confident enough to say virtually all of them.
However, these days an awful lot of the crap on the internet is churned out by non-humans. You might have been unfortunate enough to come across stuff not made by humans on the very same internet that you see the cool stuff on. It’s getting exceptionally frustrating having to wonder to oneself whether a thing was created by humans (and is therefore worth your time), or was generated by some sort of spicy autocorrect machine.
Fortunately, a clever person named Beto Dealmeida — whom I assume is human, based on having created this — has come up with a very simple solution: the human.json file.
The idea is exceptionally simple. You create a file somewhere on your website1 containing your canonical URL, as well as the canonical URLs for all the other people you know to be human. This then creates a network of people who can all attest that the stuff they (and each other) put out onto the internet was made by their own hands, and not the questionable output of some kind of slop generation machine. To go one step further, there’s also a browser extension that will collect all these ‘vouches’, and tell you whether a site has a human.json file, and whether that person has been vouched for as human by someone you’ve come across before.
I’ve been spending a lovely afternoon adding everyone I know with a blog to my human.json file, but do get in touch if I know you and you have a website I should include. If you want to include me, my canonical URL is https://skye.fyi.
Is this worth the effort? I don’t know. But at least I put in the effort using my own brain and hands.
Image: Beto Dealmeida via Codeberg
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You also have to reference the file in a
<link>tag, but that’s also very little effort. ↩