@darch@neotxt.dk I kind of agree that we can probably omit the nick part in mentions entirely. Since they can be looked up and cached, there’s no need for this. But we’ll have to spec this all up. First let’s see what @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org and @movq@www.uninformativ.de and others like @anth@a.9srv.net thing about finally formalising a standard way to lookup feed URI(s) and define a slightly more saner? @-mention syntax/usage pattern. I for one hate manually typing out (for example) @<darch https://neotxt.dk/user/darch/twtxt.txt> like this @darch@neotxt.dk 😅
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m thinking of generally the case of solving the of “bad data” when ti comes to @-mentions, typos, wrong urls and so on. In general if a client can validate an alias/mention (yes yarnd has a similar thing where we maintain a similar mapping per user and have lookup for that), then we can avoid this whole “bad data” mess in the first place. I’d also be interested to know what folks like @anth@a.9srv.net was thinking too when he mentioned the use of WebFinger. Anyway we’ll see how this pans out, yarnd (at least my pod) now has an experimental webfinger endpoint where you can do for example $ webfinger prologic@twtxt.net
This probably arrants some real-time conversation though. Are you up for a call this weekend/tomorrow? 🤔
@movq@www.uninformativ.de There are two primary problems that the use of WebFinger can help solve (that I can think of):
- Conveniently sharing your Yarn.social / Twtxt “identity” with others, much like other competing ecosystems have done. e.g:
prologic@twtxt.net(which can be looked up now with a webfinger client)
- Verifying @-mentions to be correct, potentially even rewriting them (
yarnddoes this anyway) to their proper@<url>form(s).
It is not all twtxt.txt file that adhere to having a nick = or url = field int them, so the only information we can be sure of is a URL to where the twtxt.txt is served from. That leads to using a domain+path-to-twtxt.txt as be most unambiguous identification and also how the original @<URL> mention are defined in line with the indieweb way of using a domain as id.
But with muti-user pods this get messing with urls like https://neotxt.dk/user/darch/twtxt.net, when it would be much nicer if we had http://darch.neotxt.dk/twtxt.txt like on https://darch.neocities.org/twtxt.txt and then we could omit the /twtxt.txt in daily conversation. </ramble>
@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think the only thing this bus us is “shorter identities” with feed uris that can be looked up and validated, really.
And this is true, I wouldn’t expect every Twtxt feed on ever web server to have a webfinger service. So we’d have to fallback anyway.
@darch@neotxt.dk If we want to make follow users and cross-pod mentioning easier for users, I would just drop the whole Twtxt feed URi entirely and just use webfinger period. Its far easier for non-technical people to reason about if we do that. Of course the actual Twtxt feed URL(s) are still there, just abstracted away from the users.
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Come to think of it, it’s actually an appealing “options” thing to support anyway I think. It sure does make looking things up a lot easier. It makes no difference to us now, since we all follow each other and have webb established clients and following maps, but if we think another few years from now how things might evolve, new users might appreciate a more “straight forward” mechanisms/lookup and address/identity.