Re: Standardizing the printed and HTML version of a an ActivityPub handle

I agree that a URI is the best format for machine to machine communication.
But there's the different question of how should a user conceptualize their
handle.

I know plenty of young adults who are social media users who do not know
what "https://" is and in fact find it incredibly confusing.

At least

@username@social.example
username@social.example
@username.social.example

are all relatively email-ish. And email sucks too compared to what you get
on a centralized service like Instagram where you say "just search for
@username" or even just "username" which pretty unambiguously resolves in
that context.

But this is all hunches and anecdata on my part. Are there any user studies
on this kind of thing?

This is such a frustrating problem space. It feels like there are no good
answers.

On Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 4:15 PM Benjamin Goering <ben@bengo.co> wrote:

> Yes, that clarifies, thanks.
>
> I think it makes the most sense in general for people to put the URL to
> their profile, e.g. https://bengo.is or https://mastodon.social/@bengo .
> Anything else is very much at risk of not being understandable to the
> other end of the phone, and e.g. does not get the usual HCI affordances of
> tappable hyperlinks, confuses your friends etc.
> The most straightforward advice is: "just share the URL. some other people
> who are *really into it* do this at sign thing, which makes it hard for you
> to click the links, but just ignore that. it works best when you just treat
> it like the web, because it is."
> the at sign thing is unnecessary and just confuses people about how to
> interpret the at sign. that's what we have uri schemes for.
>
> and while that's a rationalization of my advice, what it all really comes
> down to is: if the advice is to share normal URLs, there will be less
> end-user confusion, simpler user experience with tappable hyperlinks across
> all comms channels, etc. Any other norm makes the user experience worse. I
> don't fault people for doing it, but I dont think it's because it's good
> for UX or adoption, I think it's because mastodon entrenched it heavily
> informed by a webfingerism that the ActivityPub editors very
> intentionally decided not to use in ActivityPub (it's not even mentioned
> once in AP).
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 16, 2025 at 2:36 PM Johannes Ernst <
> johannes.ernst@dazzlelabs.net> wrote:
>
>> It sounds to me like you are addressing a different requirement than I
>> meant to bring up.
>>
>> I’m not attempting to say “disallow http identifiers for AP”. I’m also
>> not talking about anything related to how software can figure out something.
>>
>> I am asking for a convention for how users write down their social web
>> handles when asked. On paper sign-up sheets. On HTML registration forms
>> (like my use case). And conversely, how they should be rendered when shown
>> to the user, such as when printed on a business card, or shown on a website.
>>
>> E.g. — and this is just one possible proposal:
>>
>> * If your canonical identifier is http/s, provide this. Protocol is
>> optional (like we’ve gotten used to in web browsers)
>> * If your canonical identifier is acct:, provide @foo@bar
>>
>> In HTML,
>>
>> * if your canonical identifier is http/s, show <a
>> href=“<URI>”>URI-without-proto</a>
>> * if your canonical identifier is acct, show <a
>> href=“<PROFILEURI>”>@foo@bar</a> where PROFILEURI is … you get the
>> picture.
>>
>> (Could have have cute text adornment, too)
>>
>> Does this clarify?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>>
>>
>> Johannes.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sep 16, 2025, at 13:54, Benjamin Goering <ben@bengo.co> wrote:
>>
>> By design, ActivityPub IDs can be any URL. So for https, for example,
>> that means it's important to consider the rendering of activitypub ids like
>> https://bengo.is/this-persona/this-context/ as distinct from
>> https://bengo.is/this-persona
>>
>> MY concern with a lot of what you suggested, and this suggestion in
>> general, is that none of those ways of rendering accommodate the
>> flexibility in ActivityPub of an actor potentially having any https URL as
>> it's only identifier.
>>
>> I would also point out that this seems redundant to some extent with the
>> 'name' property on actor, which already is an affordance for a human
>> readable representation of an actor.
>> This seems like something that should be decided by individual actors and
>> their choices of how to use the protocol, not necessarily decided by a
>> standardization committee. To some extent it already has been decided: Just
>> print the URL, and if that's too ugly, use the value of the 'name' property
>> and hyperlink to an https://url (e.g. from id or url properties).
>>
>> To summarize
>> 1) I think it's usually a good idea to use the .name property for a
>> representation of the 'handle'. that's what it's for. hyperlink to .id or
>> .url depending on uri schemes
>> 2) Your suggestions dont accomodate valid and useful ActivityPub Actor
>> IDs, eg.g. the example I gave before:
>> https://bengo.is/this-persona/this-context/ . However, the render method
>> I suggested above accomodates this just fine.
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 16, 2025 at 1:32 PM Johannes Ernst <
>> johannes.ernst@dazzlelabs.net> wrote:
>>
>>> During registration for FediForum (which is coming up again, by the
>>> way!) we are asking people for their social web handles:
>>>
>>> Here is a selection of what they give us when they probably mean
>>> ActivityPub
>>>
>>> @foo@bar
>>> AP: @foo@bar
>>> https://bar/@foo
>>> foo@bar
>>> foo (???)
>>> acct:foo@bar
>>>
>>> Is it time to define a canonical version?
>>>
>>> Perhaps there could also be a canonical, clickable HTML version.
>>>
>>> Just a thought.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Johannes.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>