Interoperability of Virtual Public Squares

The Virtual Public Square is comprised of multiple instances of the Virtual Public Square component software operated and controlled by different people or companies.

The overall system exhibits an extreme degree of openness, driven by the unusual characteristics of the initial design. The most important of these characteristics are globally unique addressing and recognition that content in the public square is public by definition.

Virtual Public Square Characteristics

Exclusively Public

Publishers post content to Virtual Public Squares to gain reach for that content. In some cases, the content might be complete works, and in other cases it will be summaries linking back to websites for the purpose of generating traffic.

This content is portable between Virtual Public Squares without loss of cryptographic provenance and without any change in the primary key of the content.

Virtual Public Squares serve feeds, lists, and search results over HTTPS as simple JSONL files, with each line containing an article of content.

Globally Unique Identity

Publishers create and host their own decentralized identities using the did:psqr standard and namespace within the overall W3C Decentralized IDentity framework.

This is easily accomplished. The PSQR command line interface generates keys and identity documents that are served as static content. The PSQR WordPress plugin handles proper did:psqr responses to make identities available for an entire site or for specific user profiles on a site.

Globally Unique Content Addressing

Each article of content posted to a Virtual Public Square is identified with a content address. The address is a simple hash of metadata and it does not change as the content moves from Virtual Public Square to Virtual Public Square.

The Mechanics of Interoperability

Feeds and Lists

The contents of a typical Virtual Public Square Feed can be examined with standard software tools. Simply GET the Feed over HTTPS and examine the data. Each line of a Feed contains an article of content, and each article of content identifies the publisher and contains a JSON Web Signature that can be validated with the public key in the did:psqr identity of the publisher.

curl --silent \
https://feed.ology.com/feed/politics-mainstream/latest.jsonl | \
head -1 | jq

Replicating an Entire Virtual Public Square

If there is a concern with the policies of any Virtual Public Square, the content can easily be replicated and distributed in another Virtual Public Square operated by some other group.

The broadcast firehose is also available as JSONL, but containing the JSON Web Tokens posted by publishers directly so that any other Virtual Public Square component may validate and ingest it all to create a new instance.

curl --silent \
https://broadcast.ology.com/broadcast/latest.jsonl | \
head -2 | jq

Integrating a Website

In most cases, publishers will choose to host their own identities, publish content, and cross-promote themselves within groups.

The did:psqr method of the W3C Decentralized IDentity project attaches identity at the site domain level for the entire site, or on the profile URL of a specific author to identify authors distinctly. These identities are simple JSON files available at specific URLs when requested with specific request headers.

Embedded site widgets are used to cross-promote among a group of websites.

Sites running WordPress use the Virtual Public Square plugin to easily host identities and add widgets. The psqr command to create them and publish using them.

public-square.github.io

Documenting Virtual Public Square concepts and usage.