Atproto DID as phone number

Continuing the discussion from Proposal: iroh-with-atp:

There’s a pattern emerging of atproto for personal identity and iroh for device/app identity.

For example, atproto DIDs as phone numbers, mediated by Iroh. To me, my DID is already behaving as my social-media phone number. My domain of course is the shorthand, but the did is the actual number.

It’s not important that the did itself is humanly memorable. Even our phone contacts nowadays are 99% names; we only know the actual number of a handful relatives and best friends (I honestly can only be bothered to remember my own and my dad’s).

From @boscolo.co :

People might see “phone numbers” (and thus analogies to phone numbers) as somehow a private identifier so the thought of it hanging it out there for all to see is cursed. In reality it isn’t, it’s public like an email address but the spam-blocking is so bad people want to hide it in the closet

Any atproto app based on iroh-live could call other users through any other app supporting the same calling convention.

So I could be on Roomy placing a call to @scottlanoue.com who’d pick it up on his Atmosphere OS.

Chad Fowler has built the single-app version of this already in freeq: AV Call Protocol — the room where humans and agents work

Once another app has mimicked that implementation we can give app-agnostic calls a try.

12 Likes

Incredible idea tbh, I hadn’t really gotten Iroh-pilled until this thread. I’ve been working on a couple of different things to prove this:

  • Can an atproto web app add calling through a re-usable WebSocket bridge? Yes! I was able to call myself from comail/witchsky forks. Next, it would be cool to close the loop on @boscolo.co’s question (Witchsky) and explore using iroh directly in the browser thanks to WASM
  • Can an atproto handle act as a device level calling address, with native Android and iOS integrations including system UI integration (think like recent call log)? Android is working and proven, iOS is implemented and close, but I should be able to test iOS ↔ Android very soon.

I’ve got some of this (mac / android) implemented and a video here, will keep working to polish this up so I can share it to tangled soon: Witchsky

6 Likes

Just to add to the fun, I finally finished my proof of concept for a decentralized group chat baed one BeeKEM for DCGKA. @boscolo.co on Bluesky

It is a bit orthogonal to the Iroh approach because it supports small encrypted groups (not just p2p). I had already built the calling using WebRTC not Iroh. You can do group video calls p2p for a small number of participants, beyond that you need and SFU. Which leads to my question, is anyone working on an SFU approach using Iroh?

3 Likes