Re: Thinking about Webfinger

Personally:

1. I regret that the Webfinger format and the DID document format diverged. They have the same root in XRD and large overlap in what they can express. If they hadn’t diverged, we’d have a standardized way to express public keys and related machinery in Webfinger now, for example, and the mess around public keys as used with AP would be smaller.

2. Correspondingly, it was a mistake to think of “Webfinger-based lookup” as something completely different from other forms of identifier metadata lookup such as DID resolution (what else is a DID resolution for did:http other than a (worse) form of webfinger lookup with an http resource?). There’s a single “I have an identifier, what now?” process, which we should have defined as an abstract process, and then we should have defined how that looks like for different types of identifiers.

3. The intelligence for completing / guessing incomplete identifiers should have been put into the resolution process, rather than the client. So webfinger?q=foo.bar should have been a permitted query, producing, among other things, the canonical id of https://foo.bar/ if that’s what resolves.

4. IMHO the ActivityPub actor file could have been an extension of such a Webfinger++ format, rather than a separate file. I understand they evolved differently, but conceptually they serve the same purpose: “tell me more about what I can do with this identifier”. Also, how many implementations regularly check both for updates?

However! These, and none of the other proposed changes that I have heard on this thread are remotely sufficient to justify breaking changes in a system that works IMHO. Perhaps they can be slid in **without breaking** any existing implementation, in which case it might make sense to ponder them, but only then.

P.S. The ancient Yadis website — by which way XRD came from Oasis to the internet and before it fragmented — is still on-line. https://yadis.org/

Cheers,



Johannes.

Johannes Ernst
Blog: https://reb00ted.org/
FediForum: https://fediforum.org/
Dazzle: https://dazzle.town/

> On May 6, 2023, at 06:32, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Correction:  should read .well-known/webfinger?user=bob@host
> 
> so 6. 5. 2023 v 15:31 odesílatel Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com <mailto:melvincarvalho@gmail.com>> napsal:
>> Back in 2012 Mark Nottingham suggested a way to lookup JSON data for a given handle:
>> 
>> /.well-known/user=bob@host
>> 
>> WIth the endpoint returning JSON
>> 
>> In retrospect this was a brilliant idea.  What happened with webfinger was a bit different
>> 
>> instead of user= or acct= a new URI scheme ws minted acct:
>> 
>> This was unnecessary, and there wasnt a good reason for it at the time that i can remember other than to use uris.
>> 
>> Also at the time the JSON that came back was JRD, a whole new flavour of JSON modele on XRD.  However, XRD failed to gain popularity, and JRD is a different format to most of the fediverse.
>> 
>> Would it be time to simplify webfiger in 3 ways.
>> 
>> 1. no longer need the acct: URI scheme
>> 2. use the simpler acct=user@host form
>> 3. return a JSON serialization that is the same format as AP objects
>> 
>> The existing infrastructure would need to be maintained because its used in places such as OIDC, however a newer endpoint could be advertised for newer systems, opting in.  Perhaps even could be proposed to the IETF as Webfinger 2.
>> 
>> Is this too big a leap, or worth writing up?