Pubky is definitely inspired by RemoteStorage and the general Unhosted.org philosophy. I believe we do things that RemoteStorage does not do though. Most importantly; Pkarr instead of web fingers, and the paginated listing API making Pubky an ordered key value store, not just a filesystem.
how do you envision it happening? like how are users going to authenticate from a random webapp in order to read or write to their backend?
we are further ahead from vision, we have an e2e example in pubky-core repo. And it is all specced out here https://pubky.github.io/pubky-core/spec/auth.html Long story short; the web app asks the user for specific capabilities, the user approves by sending a signed token to the web app (using httprelay.io) then that web app uses this signed token to sign in to the user homeserver and get a good old session cookie with only the capabilities that the user approved
Webfinger was by far the weakest part in the stack. So many mistakes like spinning up a new URI scheme, inventing a new JSON format, and moving away from its original use case.
FWIW the inventor of unhosted/remotestorage, now works on Solid. I remember going to the first unhosted meetups over 10 years ago, and still know one of the team. But after a decade it's yet to take off in a major way, and newer solutions have come along.