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Domains & Lexicon Authority

draft first cut, 2026-09-13.

Four domains, each scoped to exactly one role rather than one domain trying to cover all of them:

  • breadcrumbs.id — NSID authority for the base Trail record itself (id.breadcrumbs.trail), and breadcrumbs’ own real issuer identity: issuer.breadcrumbs.id, a live, permanent, self-hosted AT Protocol server. It’s also published as a did:webvh identity — a self-certifying identity log anyone can independently verify without trusting a directory operator, directly on-thesis for an attestation-layer project. /whois lets anyone see who has publicly vouched for it. Now actually published, not just asserted. The same real mechanism hypercerts.org and smokesignal.events use: a _lexicon.breadcrumbs.id DNS TXT record naming the controlling DID, and an actual com.atproto.lexicon.schema record written into that DID’s own repo (at://did:plc:x44m.../com.atproto.lexicon.schema/id.breadcrumbs.trail, fetchable by anyone, no auth). This closed a gap this chapter originally disclosed rather than hid — the authority was previously asserted by convention (owning the domain, running the server) with nothing a third party could independently check; now the schema itself is checkable the same way /whois already lets someone check the issuer’s own vouching.
  • breadcrumbs.network — the wider-ecosystem interop point: compliant with other projects’ lexicons for interop’s sake, not just hosting breadcrumbs’ own schema. Live as of 2026-09-19, a real deploy rather than an empty registered name: breadcrumbs.network, with a cross-linked German version at /de/, hand-authored static HTML on the same VPS and Caddy instance as breadcrumbs.run. Its first tenant is CoCore Attractor, a separate physical compute/attestation-node project for field robots and tractors (at.tractor NSID authority; its own tractor.at domain stays lexicon-authority-only until a real Austria partner exists), shown through its own design language, Cab & Hitch. The page was also pitched to Ronen Tamari the same day as a candidate partner project inside MOSAIC (his own R&D program spanning ATScience, Cosmik/Semble, MIRA, Discourse Graphs, eLife Pathways, Catalyze) — sent, no reply yet, genuinely open either way, not something this page claims one way or the other.
  • breadcrumbs.run — the execution/plumbing layer: labeler, inference endpoints, and the services mostly invisible on the traditional web. This compendium’s own home (docs.breadcrumbs.run) sits alongside it.
  • breadcrumbs.chat — a shared space where humans and agents socialize together around contributions.

Co-evolving, not competing

OXA already defines a pub.oxa.* lexicon for publishing scientific documents on AT Protocol — documents live in any personal server, user-owned, portable, discoverable. breadcrumbs.network’s own schema should co-evolve with pub.oxa.* rather than compete with it as a second, incompatible document lexicon.

Breadcrumbs is the attestation layer, not a competing document format. The ambition is to eventually cover what OXA, Curvenote, and Discourse Graphs each already do well in their own domain — document representation, continuous/modular authoring, and claim/evidence structuring — through integration points with each, not by reimplementing any of them. A trail record’s subject field references an artifact wherever it actually lives and however it’s represented (an OXA document, a Curvenote manuscript, a Discourse Graphs node, a plain PDF) — deliberately addressing-scheme-agnostic, which is also why the base record doesn’t need a title, abstract, or content-structure field of its own.

Deliberately postponed, not decided: whether every contribution ends up with its own decentralized identity, versus an AT-URI record inside the author’s existing repository — the author field works either way; this gets revisited once co-evolution with OXA’s own document-identity model clarifies it, not decided in isolation.

Co-evolution isn’t only a publishing-side argument — see Dogfooding: Margin as the First Experiment for a live example already in progress, from the consuming side instead.