A Pod Root is a shared domain or subdomain that acts as the “root habitat” under which many individual author sites live. It is the addressable namespace for a cluster of personal or wikis that belong together, while still keeping each author’s site independent and forkable.
In the Hitchhiker Academy project, for example:
vision.hitchhiker.academy
can be treated as a Pod Root for a Vision Pod. Under that Pod Root you might host multiple author wikis such as:
david.vision.hitchhiker.academy thompson.vision.hitchhiker.academy
The point of a Pod Root is to make a social topology visible in DNS. When you see an author subdomain under the Pod Root, you can immediately understand “this is a person (or a role) inside this particular pod”, without needing a central directory service. Tools such as the about present plugin can then utilise this structure.
A Pod Root fits naturally with Federated Wiki because it supports the cultural pattern of many small, personally-owned sites that can still share and fork pages between each other. The Pod Root gives a convenient way to say “these sites are neighbours”, without turning them into a single monolith.
A Pod Root is also a practical unit for operations and governance. You can attach shared infrastructure (backups, analytics choices, common CSS/JS assets, moderation policies, onboarding docs) to the Pod Root, while still letting each author keep editorial sovereignty over their own site.
A Pod Root can be used as a lightweight identity layer. The subdomain name (e.g. `david`) is a human-readable handle, while more robust verification can be layered on top (for example with Trust Favicon Pack and a Ring of Trust approach), so that a browser or plugin can validate that “this author site is genuinely part of this pod”.
A Pod Root makes it easy to scale from one pod to many pods. You can imagine:
learn.hitchhiker.academy field.hitchhiker.academy law.hitchhiker.academy
as different Pod Roots, each holding its own constellation of author sites, each with its own culture, practices, and shared tooling.
# See