Nice to see a blogpost on the Mastodon blog about implementing a basic ActivityPub server https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-basic-activitypub-server/
(Though technically webfinger isn't needed for activitypub, but it is for mastodon interop!)
@cwebber I'm curious how subscribing between different AP server implementations is going to work UX-wise. Mastodon, Pleroma and peertube all work with the user @ domain webfinger scheme, but what identifiers shall be used for implementations lacking webfinger?
Just search for https://toot.matereal.eu/users/schmittlauch instead of @schmittlauch.
@notclacke @schmittlauch @cwebber Honestly though, I've always liked the user@instance format that other federated networks use. It's a pretty useful way to think about users across the network; conceptually that identifier feels closer to email.
URL works okay, but the flow and the logic is kind of different.
@cwebber @deadsuperhero @notclacke @schmittlauch For the most part it seems to be based on the (mistaken) assumption that if users address each other by user@domain, then so should computers. But that's not really a valid or useful assumption... it's also already caused issues that have been solved in suboptimal ways (re: case sensitivity, account migration, username changes, etc)
@deadsuperhero @notclacke @schmittlauch yeah I get that, and people are fairly familiar with email-like ids. I'm not arguing against clients supporting that for composition of addressing anyway, but it does bother me that Mastodon uses Webfinger for some sources of information where it shouldn't matter for protocol'y things
I think that could hold back some exciting future things if it remains. But fortunately my suspicion is that it won't be hard for mastodon to evolve there.