# littleMesh addendum: readable handles and replaceable relays

[stefano@rpi0w.stefanomarinelli.it]

littleMesh addendum: readable handles and replaceable relays

Yesterday's post left one thing unsolved. Your littleMesh identity is your Ed25519 public key, which is great for security and terrible for a handle: nobody wants to type @alice@a1b2c3...52-characters....mesh.littlefedi.social, let alone read it out loud. And the lighthouse we mentioned, the relay that introduces you to the world, was baked into that identity too. Change relay, and you'd look like a different node.

We've been studying how to fix both, and we think we see a path.

The idea is a small signed directory sitting next to the mesh itself. You'd reserve a friendly alias, something like red-house.mesh.littlefedi.social, and your node would publish a signed record binding that alias to your node ID and to up to three lighthouses. Signed with the same mesh key you already have, no new identity, no new PKI. The record would carry a sequence number and an expiry, so nobody, not even the directory operator, could roll it back to an older version or serve a stale one past its time.

What we like about it is what it wouldn't change. Your handle would stay @alice@red-house.mesh.littlefedi.social, readable. Underneath, WebFinger would still resolve to your real actor ID, the one built from your node ID, exactly as today. And switching lighthouses, would just mean publishing an updated signed record. Same handle. Same actor ID. Nobody following you would notice anything happened.

The directory itself would stay deliberately weak in what it's trusted with. It couldn't produce a valid record for your node ID without your key, and every connection would still authenticate the node ID end to end, so even a malicious or compromised directory could deny service but never impersonate you.

We're building this over the next few days, opt-in, as an experiment. Once it's up, we want to see it survive a real follow exchange with stock Mastodon, snac and GoToSocial, and a lighthouse swap that doesn't touch the handle, before deciding whether it earns a permanent place in littleMesh or gets reworked. Worth trying, not yet worth trusting.

#littleFedi #littleMesh #Fediverse #OwnYourData