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this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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Fediverse
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That's basically what SRV records accomplish. When I looked a while back to see if ActivityPub had support/plans to support them, I landed on, I think, a Mastaton feature request where the response was "won't implement SRV" because "webfinger already does that" (it does not).
Personally, I think SRV records and webfinger solve different problems and can complement each other. The ActivityPub software would lookup the SRV record matching its platform and use the result from that to query the correct webfinger endpoint to resolve the user's URI for that platform.
I have no idea why SRV records seem to have fallen out of fashion, but they would easily solve the delegation problem since that's exactly what they were designed for. lol
So much yes. You'd think that'd be the first thing they'd bake in the ActivityPub spec, given it governs how the user handles are handled, they even look like E-Mail addresses. Yet nobody seems to have thought about making the usernames sane. It's the first thing I looked up while setting my Lemmy, can I make the username look less stupid, as I did with Matrix when I set that one up.
There's a weird trend towards stuffing everything as HTTP(S) web APIs and JSON. We're about to get to a point where everything will talk over websockets because we forgot TCP exists.
Ha, one of my biggest pet peeves is developers poorly re-inventing a wheel that already exists as a standard.
ActivityPub does not govern how user handles work. All AP actors are defined by their IDs (which in Lemmy's case happens to be the URL their profile is hosted in, which is a mistake as you cannot change your username without breaking federation, but at least Lemmy isn't alone, both Mastodon and I think *oma family of software do the same thing)
AFAIK the @username@instance convention is Webfinger's doing, and (to the best of my very incomplete knowledge) the convention of "preferredUsername @ the hostname of the object ID" is a hack Mastodon pulled that got adopted as a de-facto standard (as is quite a lot of other things in AP).