
The Real Deal About rel="me" - tempodox
https://wiki.zegnat.net/media/the-real-deal-about-rel-me.html
======
Normal_gaussian
The largest problem the semantic web is tackling is answering the question
that is at the end of the article

> If someone has the URI of that thing, what relationships to what other
> objects is it useful to know about?

In many ways, its really a question about the observer than the page; which
means the pages seeking to answer it - even for their own special cases - will
get the answer consistently, and often subtly, wrong.

The upshot is that pages will comply or optimise for particular observers- for
financial or political reasons. This makes it very hard for observers not
fitting the expected mould to make definitive use of the semantic web.

For example, a world in which distributed validation is not immediately
politically or financially important (ours) is one in which such schemes as
described in the article are faced with a huge problem of being consistently
and often subtly broken.

User validation isn't something I'd like to be widely broken.

------
geofft
rel="me" for authentication sounds like it could help with the inevitable
problem of Mastodon account verification. Instead of putting a verified
checkmark on your name, whatever that is supposed to mean, put one on your
home page if there's a rel="me" pointing back to the same profile. Parties
that don't fully trust you (other federated servers, most likely, but
individual clients if necessary) can verify the relationship before displaying
the check mark.

~~~
epeus
Mastodon now publishes rel=me on profile links, so you can do bidirectional
verification between mastodon and other rel=me publishers like github and
wordpress, as well as your own site.
[https://xoxo.zone/@KevinMarks/100616472097157585](https://xoxo.zone/@KevinMarks/100616472097157585)

~~~
epeus
more discussion of this in a fediverse context:
[https://pleroma.site/notice/3922993](https://pleroma.site/notice/3922993)

------
zeveb
I really like the Indie Web stuff, and I think that their idea of using one's
own website as a login is a great one. The problem is that one _actually_ ends
up using some third-party website (e.g. github.com) to run authentication for
one — and generally via a fourth (indieauth.com). Adding two extraneous
parties to an authentication seems pretty extraneous to me: rather, it'd be a
good idea just to specify a way to run web sign-in entirely from one's own
site.

~~~
detaro
One _can_ do that, but it's built entirely on a protocol to do exactly this:

> _just to specify a way to run web sign-in entirely from one 's own site_

and many in the community do not involve third parties. The rel=me thing
through IndieAuth.com is merely a trick to get started quickly, by relying on
existing identity providers.

[http://indieauth.net/](http://indieauth.net/)

------
kkaranth
I've found that almost all the results I get from Google these days point to
some "big site": pinterest, quora, wired, verge, etc. Often, these sites are
behind a paywall/login wall, and the content isn't very good either.

Is the whole concept of authors publishing their opinions and thoughts on
their personal websites dying, or is Google ranking such posts lower?

~~~
amelius
By the way, why can't I still tell Google to ignore e.g. pinterest or
w3schools?

Google wants to know everything about me so they can serve me better (they
claim), but a simple preference to exclude a website from my search results is
not possible?

~~~
Nadya
_> By the way, why can't I still tell Google to ignore e.g. pinterest or
w3schools?_

You can. Use "-site:pinterest.com -site:w3schools.com". To facilitate using it
in every search, setup a keyword search so you can type "gsearch blah" and
have the querystring automatically add those two filters. I agree there should
be a way to add sites to a global blacklist in your user settings if you have
a Google account. I'm sure Google has monetary reasons for not doing so
though.

~~~
codetrotter
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-
blocklist...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist-by-
goo/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef)

Personal Blocklist (by Google)

Blocks domains/hosts from appearing in your Google search results.

~~~
Nadya
Neat, but this isn't a complete solution as I, and many others, use Firefox. I
can't see a good reason this needs to be an addon instead of a user setting,
other than to only allow only Chrome users to use the "official" add-on. There
is a Firefox version that, perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek, is called "Personal
Blocklist (not by Google)". I keep the number of addons I install to a minimum
so will be sticking with my keyword searches (I actually filter Pinterest from
my searches).

------
forkerenok
Reading the article I couldn't get rid of the feeling "gee, what a first world
problem" (where by the world I mean the World Wide Web).

On the actual topic:

Rel="me" sounds bizzarely narrow, at the same time wildcard-ish and borderline
narcissistic. Something like Rel="about:author" or Rel="author:blog" seems
better to me.

Disclosure: not big on web semantics.

~~~
detaro
As the article says, it's not for authorship (rel="author" and a bunch of
other options), but for connecting profiles. What's borderline narcissistic
about that? Is keybase.io also "borderline narcissistic" since you can verify
accounts on it, or Github because you can link to your homepage from your
profile? (which they actually mark up with rel="me", but that's all rel=me
does: make the existing links machine readable, and the bidirectional linking
allows some level of verification)

~~~
forkerenok
Thanks for clarifying and pardon my half-assed reading, I get the idea now!

I see the benefit of authenticating personal profiles and protecting people
against account hijacking and fake accounts.

With "borderline narcissistic" I was referring to the fact that personal
profiles are a giant part of the web nowadays (which is sad on some level) and
creating even a special rel value for it felt like submitting to the current
state of affairs.

~~~
icebraining
Personal profiles were always a big part of the web; in the 90s, it was all
those sites with URLs with a tilde (e.g. [https://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/](https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/)),
and lots of pages on Geocities et all were also personal profiles.

