Re: Thinking about Webfinger

ne 7. 5. 2023 v 5:11 odesílatel Johannes Ernst <johannes.ernst@gmail.com>
napsal:

> On May 6, 2023, at 19:05, ben@bengo.co wrote:
>
> It seems like it is more human-centric to accommodate resolving via a
> service chosen by the human doing the resolving, not a service chosen by
> the author or controller of the identifier.
>
>
> Now you opened up a larger issue …
>
> (Perhaps somebody can point to an example for this in the wild, because
> I’d love to see one and am not aware of one (other than self-hosting the
> webfinger endpoint at your own domain))
>
> 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:
>
> * My primary identifier is @j12t@social.coop, and by default its
> corresponding webfinger file has Mastodon stuff in it.
>

It's quite interesting how such ideas go in cycles, ie "my primary
identifier is @j12t@social.coop"

This email to the IETF from bluesky struck me as similar:

"The idea is indeed that at:// could user-facing in the same way http://
is. The intent is to express a social address so that I could be at://
pfrazee.com to provide a social identity and http://pfrazee.com to provide
a website. We're hoping to make the scheme intuitive to people, as it has a
clear connection to the "@pfrazee.com" convention."

I didnt think of this, but it seems they want to turn @ into a URI scheme.

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/uri-review/ApSEK9-3qgvLD0U-2IFz8Ja0OMU/


> * But I also have a blog at https://reb00ted.org, and I would like to
> advertise this fact inside the same webfinger file, and declare its
> frontpage url an alias
> * And I have a calckey account at @j12t@calckey.social, treat it as an
> alias
> * and perhaps my did:key as well, while we are at it.
> etc.
>
> … and all three identifiers, when locally resolved against their
> respective webfinger endpoint, produce the same webfinger file. Or the same
> webfinger++ = DID file if we put the DID in there as well. Now I could
> conduct business all across the place as a single person, using the same
> identifier everywhere. And if you looked up my identifier, you can easily
> choose where and how to interact with me.
>
> Notes:
> * Of course only if I wanted to have those identifiers correlated.
> * This may need a (small) webfinger extension to allow to specify which of
> the aliases to use with a given link element
> * There are some practical problems to be resolved how to keep those files
> consistent. Maybe it would be easiest to have N-1 of them redirect to the
> “primary” one, which is the “editable data” webfinger endpoint.
>
> Again, there is a lot that could be done on this front, but I continue to
> believe that the majority in the survey respondents was right, the most
> interest and focus right now should be
> 1) to work down the issue log and
> 2) improve security and privacy, hopefully in a non-breaking manner.
>
> Cheers,
>
>
>
> Johannes.
>
> Johannes Ernst
> Blog: https://reb00ted.org/
> FediForum: https://fediforum.org/
> Dazzle: https://dazzle.town/
>
>