this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
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@trwnh@mastodon.social fun fact, webfinger actually supports URLs and [in theory] phone numbers!
The key (and this is a social science and cultural insight, not technical) is that when you ask someone's "name" or "address" they need something that's unambiguous, personal, and opaque in the sense that it works everywhere (online / distributed, it needs to be globally unique, too) or they won't use it.
Bare domains aren't ideal because (1) they're expensive and (2) management is hard.
@trwnh the "trick" with webfinger is that it's a way to go from a "name" to an authoritative context (the authority for "x@y.xyz"' is "y.xyz" and the authority for "blah.com" is "blah.com"; the challenge with phone numbers is that it's impossible to infer the authority for +1-416-867-5309 / telcos don't provide a lookup system). That's really it; the rest is a cultural thing.
@blaine there might not be an authority for a phone number but i think it can be handled more like a combo of "local dns resolver" + "registry of phone number". sure in many cases with identifiers that have an authority component you can just use their webfinger if they have one, but i think it would also be cool to be able to use your own webfinger and "proxy out" as needed, in the same way that dns does it
@trwnh@mastodon.social lolsob. This is/was the whole point of webfinger ("It's DNS, for people") but the mastodon implementation kind of missed that part. But it's trivially possible to do that.
My ideal is to have one "personal address" [per life context, e.g., work, family, social, etc] that points to different stuff I'm sharing in different contexts, with tagging to indicate in which contexts it the various feeds/etc might be useful. e.g., a tech-focused mastodon feed, a pixelfed feed for family, etc.
@trwnh .. and *critically* for what I think you're saying, there's nothing preventing linking from a webfinger profile to e.g. a wiki or a webpage of any sort, or another identifier like a phone number or a signal account. Again, this is all stuff that informed the original design of webfinger, over 15 years ago now 🙈
@blaine yup, more or less. the only difference i'd make is that instead of having multiple feeds for mastodon/pixelfed/etc i'd rather it was all done via the same identity
one of the things that i wish were implemented broadly is support for
streams-- arbitrary collections that you could post into and other people could follow. to my knowledge no one other than google+ has done it. and, well... we know how google+ went...@trwnh@mastodon.social oh, totally. To be clear, the way I imagine it is that to end users, it all looks like a single identity, and which feed/stream is negotiated based on the context you're using the identity. So, e.g., my main public profile might be "blaine@bcook.ca", and if someone tried to follow me on mastodon, they'd get my "short text notes" stream, and if someone else tried to follow me from pixelfed they'd get my "square format insta-like-social photos" stream.