WebFinger

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Three pane comic of two businessmen chatting about how to look up an email address which is actually an acct: URI which requires a complex answer.

WebFinger is a discovery protocol for the web that uses email address-like identifiers (or acct: URIs) to get info about users, while IndieWeb sites (and their owners) typically use their personal site address as identifiers instead.

The name "WebFinger" is based on the unix finger tool.

Why not

Many IndieWeb projects choose to have people identified by their personal web site’s URL (possibly containing representative h-card) instead.

IndieWeb Examples

Problems

Use of email address-like IDs

This is widely regarded as a benefit of webfinger (“normal people don’t understand URIs and are more comfortable with email addresses”). Problems with this:

  • general problems with email addresses as personal identifiers
  • looking like email addresses is great for usability, *until* it turns out that sometimes webfinger IDs aren’t email addresses — opening ambiguity and confusion (is this email address a webfinger ID? Can I send email to this webfinger ID?)
  • webfinger IDs are not web addresses — you can’t perform HTTP requests on them
  • WebFinger thinking ties us to the widely failed “one-to-many server-to-user” federated social web model, where there is a federation of servers, each with possibly many users on. Taking an indieweb approach where everyone has at best their own domain name, at worst a subdomain, using webfinger becomes tiresome (why tantek@tantek.com when tantek.com will do? or worse, georgelandon@george.landon.org. Lots of typing)
    • I think the “one-to-many server-to-user” is still better then completely centralized models and it is easier for non technical people (see micro.blog or mastodon). For people that have their own domain, you can just use your domain name, as webfinger doesn't force the acct: scheme, you can use https: too.

acct: schema

I never figured out exactly what use this is. Someone else care to explain? --Waterpigs.co.uk 13:45, 10 March 2013 (PDT)

  • It is kind of a unique, url aware identifier: <username>@<domain>. But because it looks like an email address, it is prefixed with the acct: (it think for account) protocol. --Matthias Pfefferle

DRY Violation

WebFinger relies on DRY-violating XRD files (which within themselves sometimes repeat data due to incompatible implementations) for storing information. Extra, non-human-readable files are extremely likely to not be maintained. Better to store profile data and links in HTML(+microformats) as visible data.

Well Known URLs

Webfinger relies on well-known URLs (namespaced to a certain degree to /.well-known/). Any use of well known URLs limits flexibility, portability etc. HTML links and hypermedia discovery should be utilised instead (if webfinger IDs were webby and could be requested, this would not be necessary!).

Can't Delegate

Because Webfinger relies on well-known URLs existing on the domain, it is challenging and sometimes not even possible to delegate handling Webfinger queries to an external service.

You could do some clever reverse proxy configuration with Nginx or Apache to serve the .well-known folder from another system, but if you have a traditional shared host or static website, then this isn't possible.

  • Webfinger allows redirects, so it's easy to delegate it it. --ulpaulpa.de

Minimal Usefulness

"the only webfinger relation that matters is email address -> home page. everything else (avatar, blog, homepage, name) is already well defined / implemented / supported as hCard/h-card on your home page.
oh and rel-me for all those "other" profiles for those that spray & pray their content across silos"

Implementations

  • idno implements the basic webfinger protocol. Indiewebcamp attendees currently using this include:

Other indiewebcamp related projects making use of webfinger include:

  • Diaspora use webfinger IDs as their main way of referring to a person, for search and mentions (via salmon)
  • StatusNet uses webfinger for discovery and mentions (via D*’s custom version of salmon)
  • identengine.com’s profile discovery API accepts webfinger IDs as input

IRC Transcript

2011-06-28 #indiewebcamp:

[10:38am] tantek: The IndieWeb does not care about WebFinger - because it doesn't need it.

[10:38am] dbounds1: What makes you say that?

[10:38am] tantek: because it wasn't even *mentioned* the entire weekend.

[10:38am] brennannovak: I whole heartedly agree with tantek about activity streams

[10:39am] tantek: it turns out, when you focus on actual pragmatic/practical discussions of what *you* need to build/code/ux/design for *your* indie web site, people DO NOT CARE about WebFinger

[10:39am] tantek: they *so* don't care that it doesn't even come up

[10:39am] tantek: dbounds1 - thus I'm fairly convinced that WebFinger is pretty much a waste of time

[10:40am] dbounds1: webfinger or discovery in general?

[10:40am] tantek: oh we did plenty of work on discovery

[10:40am] tantek: just turns out none of it needed webfinger

[10:41am] dbounds1: is any of this discovery conversation documented?

[10:41am] brennannovak: tantek: hrm... I kinda feel web finger (or the whole OStatus stack) wasn't discussed much all weekend because everyone was talking about different dimensions of what the "indie web" means

[10:41am] dbounds1: Personally, I'm not interested in anything that leverages XML.

[10:42am] tantek: brennannovak - nope, it was because we were focused on *actual* practical solutions for *ourselves*

[10:42am] brennannovak: true

[10:42am] tantek: rather than architectures for theoretical needs of the masses

[10:42am] tantek: which is what nearly all other groups in this space are hung-up on

[10:42am] dbounds1: Depending on what you're building XRD/JRD and WebFinger are quite useful. I'd be interested in hearing what alternatives were proposed / suggested / used from the weekend.

[10:43am] brennannovak: yes, that is what I mean... we all were just focusing on our own implementations- which seem to be more about consuming / posting to large sites like Twitter / Facebook already

[10:43am] tantek: brennannovak - we were prioritizing in personal and practical ways.

[10:44am] brennannovak: yes, whoot!

[10:44am] tantek: and it turns out, when you do that, such things as XRD/WebFinger are actually not necessary

[10:44am] tantek: or rather

[10:44am] tantek: there's more important practical work to be done *first*

[10:44am] brennannovak: precisely

[10:44am] tantek: when you get around to actually building a site that *YOU* will use for YOURSELF

WebFist

Webfist is the software used to run a distributed fallback network to enable webfinger on email address from providers that do not yet support webfinger.

See Also

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