Re: "ActivityPub and Webfinger" CG Note, First Draft

I don't know that anyone is seriously thinking yet about using WebFinger
acct: URIs as AP actor/object ids, eg in Follow activities. The draft
report focuses on the fediverse's current use of WebFinger to resolve @-@
handles to HTTPS actor id URLs, and vice versa. The thread here so far has
discussed extending that to accounts that "represent" a domain itself.

We could consider trying to support acct: URIs as AP actor/object ids, but
it would require a substantial expansion of current fediverse expectations,
and I'm not sure it would buy us anything over the current standard of
using HTTPS URLs, which are more or less the default expectation in the
ActivityPub spec anyway.

On Tue, Mar 26, 2024 at 1:39 PM Johannes Ernst <johannes.ernst@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Let’s keep in mind what the acct: is for in WebFinger. It’s for
> representing the account of a user on a site, such as alice@example.com.
>
> When used with an AP “Follow”, clearly it means: I want to follow the
> activities of Alice on example.com and not the activities of Bob on
> example.com
>
> Where these semantics don’t work is:
>
> * I want to follow everything that happens on example.com, regardless of
> who performed the activity.
> * The site has no visible concept of an account for some person who does
> something, so there’s no account to follow.
> * I want to follow something that is not all of the site, but not scoped
> by account but by some kind of subject. E.g. I want to hear about posts
> that deal with knitting but not crocheting regardless who wrote them.
>
> Seem to be we have two choices:
>
> 1. Shoehorn the “all” and “some subject” cases above into the idea of an
> account, even when there is no account, so everything can be
> foo@example.com. This is merely ugly in case of example.com@example.com,
> but practically impossible for complex subjects. What about “I want to
> follow all middle eastern news on CNN.com if it involves a ship over 1000
> tons”? (Not something we do in the Fediverse these days, but if we ever
> want the entire web to be social, rather than just have some separate
> decentralized social media applications, essential I would argue. And I’d
> love to be able to follow subjects like this even today. Why not follow
> https://example.com/news/middle-east?query=ship-tonnage%3E100t ?)
>
> 2. Don’t shoehorn. URLs are perfectly fine as identifiers. Get existing
> software to broaden their horizons and support more use cases than copying
> legacy social only.
>
> Now shoot :-)
>
> Cheers,
>
>
>
> Johannes.
>
>
>
> > On Mar 25, 2024, at 05:46, Manton Reece <manton@micro.blog> wrote:
> >
> > This looks really good to me on my first quick reading. Another idea for
> the "Future Enhancements" section… There has been discussion in the past
> about better support for single-user servers. For example, instead of the
> redundant @user@user.com, clients should be able to reference a user with
> just @user.com. This would also encourage people to own their identity
> with their own domain name.
> >
> > Would it be appropriate to formalize this in the report? It could go
> through the FEP process too, but this report is going to be something that
> everyone reads about WebFinger.
> >
> > Nostr (NIP-5) has a convention of using underscores: _@user.com is
> displayed as just @user.com. Bluesky also uses hostnames for @-mentions.
> I believe WebFinger is fine with leaving the username off, for example
> /.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:@user.com.
> >
> > — Manton
>
>
>
>

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