Re: the possible impact of future changes in webfinger (was Re: Anonymity and multiple identities)

On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 5:22 PM, Michiel de Jong <michiel@unhosted.org> wrote:
> 1 - it must be a scheme that given some sort of human-memorable ASCII
> string, always produces the same structured data object.
> 2 - the human-memorable ASCII string should be understood by users to
> have a one-to-one mapping to online identities
> 3 - there should be no centralized control on minting these strings,
> other than DNS which we are sort of bound to already any way, by
> virtue of being on the web.
> 4 - the person who operates a specific online identity, or (in case
> DNS is used) the sysadmin of the domain this online identity belongs
> to should have control over the contents of said structured data
> object.
>
> So facebook open graph does 1, 2 and 4, but not 3, so it doesn't
> qualify as an alternative to webfinger.
> You could use URLs of foaf documents directly or in client-side certs,
> which would satisfy constraints 2,3 and 4, but not constraint 1.

actually, i should be more specific there - http URLs do, strictly
speaking, qualify as human-memorable ASCII strings, and can be
understood to map one-to-one to online identities, but
http://host/can/be/any/path is simply harder to remember and use than
user@host. That is why webfinger was invented. So should probably
mention the option of http-based identity separately. then the options
are to identify users on fedsocweb by:

- no universal scheme, each silo use its own system (i wouldn't recommend this)
- http URLs (i wouldn't recommend this)
- xmpp disco (that's an option i would say)
- webfinger (would be my preference).

Melvin, which one would you think is the best path to a successful
fedsocweb? do you see more options than these?

Received on Saturday, 7 July 2012 16:06:07 UTC