I wrote this out in the hacker house “gather” chat [[2023-01-19]]❌: nollux-dozryl is intersted and tagged in mopfel-winrux and sitful-hatred.
ideally I’d like to have a little authentication page in front of that where those friends/family could set an email+password and it would redirect them to their urbit, logging them in with the proper luscode. it might be silly, but asking most normies to type in a crazy-long password that they didn’t set and can’t remember/recover is a big ask. the people i’m thinking of don’t use password managers
the extension of that idea is: a docker image you could run on machine that stands up said “portal” at your domain of choice and gives you an admin interface for whitelisting email addresses. it would do the username/password crytpo stuff (including emailing password resets) and keep a database of their ship’s current luscode and use that to perform the initial redirect.
….or maybe that’s an urbit app….
sort of like Beacon/Sentinel. you run the “Beacon” on a ship you control, and you do the whitelisting there. that app hosts the clearweb “login portal”. when you spin up a ship for a friend, you install the counterpart “Sentinel” which tells your “Beacon” the luscode for that ship. when they visit your Beacon-hosted site on the clearweb, they enter their email+password, the Beacon agent checks it - if it’s good it uses their stored luscode to redirect them to their urbit
sort of like Beacon/Sentinel. you run the “Beacon” on a ship you control, and you do the whitelisting there. that app hosts the clearweb “login portal”. when you spin up a ship for a friend, you install the counterpart “Sentinel” which tells your “Beacon” the luscode for that ship. when they visit your Beacon-hosted site on the clearweb, they enter their email+password, the Beacon agent checks it - if it’s good it uses their stored luscode to redirect them to their urbit
[[2023-01-19]]❌ in Gather:
i’ve been wanting to build an “urbit app for grandma” that basically provides group chats, DMs and a single “facebook-wall” like posting feed for text/images + comments. something like this would be the perfect context. all the peasant ships basically just have this one grandma app installed and it’s all they see. everyone there (the orchestrator and peasants) sees each other’s usernames and can tag each other the same way - @p’s obfuscated.
build it for web, prove it out, then build a native app. every urbiter buys an NP to host their family and friends, then just gets them to install the native app on their phones.
all for the low-low price of Fuck You Facebook / month
for v1, off the top of my head: have each person be able to create “tweet”-like posts (backed by text-type gallery/heap), “instagram“-like image posts (backed by photo-type gallery/heap), and longer form posts (backed by notebooks/diaries). these would go into a group that is automatically created and has everyone joined to it on signup. as a viewer, you see everyone’s posts of all types (filterable), interleaved, ordered by recent first. as a poster, you just write a new post while viewing this feed and it creates the appropriate backing type and adds it to the feed. for v2: provide for separate channels (different groups) so that not everyone needs to see everyone. say you host an urbit for your grandma but also your raunchy old college roommate - you might want to keep the separate. But it should all just rely on Groups. especially so that once someone takes full ownership of their ship and understands how Groups works, they can just switch to that without losing anything.
if you do an excellent job with mobile push notifications in the native app, it’s a Signal/encrypted messenger replacement for family or group of friends