At a meetup everyone wants my LinkedIn. I don't have one. I give my GitHub but I don't want that either. I don't want to tie my identity to some random company that might pivot, paywall, or disappear.
What I want: one URL. Mine. thetube.today. That's the identity. What's behind it can change — S3 today, something else tomorrow. The address stays.
The problem
My stuff is everywhere:
- Code on GitHub
- Photos in iCloud
- Posts in S3
- Events in CloudFront logs
- Books in another S3 path
Each service wants to be the canonical location. Each one is a silo. None of them talk to each other. And each one could change terms, shut down, or lock me out.
The namespace
The domain is the namespace. Everything mounts under it:
thetube.today/posts/... → S3
thetube.today/books/... → S3
thetube.today/create/... → CloudFront Function
thetube.today/.well-known/... → S3 (identity, keys)
The data lives wherever makes sense. Apple can build the photo infrastructure. GitHub can host the repos. AWS can store the files. But the address is mine. The namespace is mine. The services are storage backends, not identities.
Plan 9
Everything is a file. The namespace is composable. You mount remote filesystems into your local tree. The domain is the local tree. S3, GitHub, iCloud — those are the remote filesystems mounted where I want them.
At a meetup I hand someone thetube.today. Not linkedin.com/in/whoever. Not github.com/trsvax. My namespace. What they see is what I choose to show.
The journey
Walk thought. Frustrated by everyone wanting LinkedIn at meetups. The real need: a namespace that's mine, that mounts services without being owned by them. The domain is the identity. Everything else is plumbing.