Re: Thinking about Webfinger

On May 9, 2023, at 02:26, Marcus Rohrmoser <me+swicg@mro.name> wrote:
> 
> On 7 May 2023, at 5:10, Johannes Ernst wrote:
> 
>> Now you opened up a larger issue …
>> 
>> ...
>> 
>> We tend to treat the data in the webfinger doc as static. As something 
>> that the developer creates of the app that hosts it, and that’s what 
>> that is.
>> 
>> What if we treated it as a dataset that the user can augment at will? 
>> E.g. can add “entirely unrelated” aliases into? So I could say, 
>> for example:
> 
> That holds for any server operated by anybody but yourself, right? There is few places the participant has any authority to augment things at will.
> 
> So I cannot see the special relation to webfinger here.
> 
> Operate things yourself and you have sovereignty. There is no other way to seize responsibility and agency, is there?

A server implementing webfinger could provide the augment/update functionality to enable the user to add entries. I don’t know of any that does (pointers?) but it could look like the extra profile entries that Mastodon (and others) allow, or it could even traverse and verify rel=“me” relationships and add those as aliases.

Also Webfinger could take a page out of the DID book (or re-align again going forward) and allow verification of webfinger documents, like DID Documents can be verified against a public key. That would open up additional possibilities. (And challenges. Not proposing this at this juncture.)

Cheers,



Johannes.


Johannes Ernst
Blog: https://reb00ted.org/
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