Feature: Identities - Githubissues

Identities

A person's identity in Earthstar is represented by a keypair, which is a bit like a username and password

It's made up of an address and a secret. The address is made up of a 4-letter "shortname" and something called a public key, which can look like this: @suzy.bzfkbawuj2cdxsxilvso4a2xczmcx6char4pqd2tjhdmcoy5i4ebq.

The address is publicly shareable information, and the secret should be kept, well, secret. A keypair's address or secret can never be changed, so keep it safe!

Currently, a new identity is randomly generated every time a user accesses the web app. I created a function to automatically generate identities. This random generation is based on the following shortname requirements:

 - First character needs to be a letter
 - Its length needs to be exactly 4 characters
 - It can not contain special characters (only letters and numbers)

The following features are currently implemented:

[x] Generate a new random identity
[x] Download identity keypair on local disk for future use

Here are the list of future extended identity features that should be implemented:

[ ] Identity keypair generated based on User input from a text box so they can use a shortname of their choice.
[ ] Upload identity keypair to reuse identity between sessions.

Additionally, we might be interested in providing an interface for customizing a keypair associated information since Earthstar allows for the creation of a document that holds 'about me' information.

Before such features are implemented, it would be useful to know how the resulting about me information would be displayed and made accessible.

This document is specific to a share which means you could disclose different information to users in the commons or in the studio. The following text comes from the Keypair section on Earthstar' How does it work page

But what about the ways we express our identity, like names, pronouns, or avatars?

This kind of information is stored as documents within the commons, e.g. in your "about me" document. This has two big benefits: your identity can freely fluctuate between the shares you use; and you can express your identity with as little or as much detail as you want!

hyphacoop / restructuring-futures

Feature: Identities #55

Identities