submitted 1 week ago by trwnh@mastodon.social to c/fediverse@fedia.io

96 comments fedilink hide all child comments

idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something). it's what you might call a "hot take", certainly a heterodox one to some parts of the broader #fediverse community. this is in response to recent discussion on "what do you want to see from AP/AS2 specs" (in context of wg rechartering) mostly devolving into people complaining about JSON-LD and extensibility, some even about namespacing in general (there was a suggestion to use UUID vocab terms. i'm not joking)

1/?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] trwnh@mastodon.social 0 points 1 week ago

@blaine i'm wondering to what extent fedi would implement webfinger if mastodon didn't require it

i think if i had to really pick a format for identity then it would be a weak preference for FQDN, but having your id be a pretty-url is also okay i guess. but one other thing that i think would be cool is being able to find your contacts via webfinger if they choose to make themselves findable by other means! so you could do wf?resource=tel: or ?resource=mailto: and still get back useful info...

[-] blaine@mastodon.social 1 points 1 week ago

@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@mastodon.social 1 points 1 week ago

@blaine@mastodon.social tumblr made it work so idk if it's "ideal" per se but they definitely had a cultural thing going for quite a while with "dot tumblr dot com" even being a meme at some point

it can't be too hard to manage tbh, the modern version of this is atproto handle services that do nothing but allocate you a subdomain for use on bluesky

[-] blaine@mastodon.social 1 points 1 week ago

@trwnh@mastodon.social yup! My long-standing argument is that "jesus of nazareth" is the same thing in a social context as an email address / webfinger address, and that "[person] in [context]" is something that's seared into how we do social cognition, whether it's "[name] [family name]" or "[family name] [name]" – i.e., the format per se doesn't matter so much as the recognition that names-for-humans are different from http-style links with e.g. paths and query strings, etc.

load more comments (15 replies)

this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024

1 points (100.0% liked)

News from fediverse

0 readers

14 users here now

founded 9 months ago