@trwnh@mastodon.social @by_caballero@mastodon.social (one thing to note is that it's not possible to declare an alias, e.g. a phone number in a wf or other profile, and then use that alias in reverse as a way to look up the original profile. I mean, one could do it, but with questions of identity at play it would be an incredibly very extremely bad idea to do that from every conceivable security perspective.)

@trwnh@mastodon.social @by_caballero@mastodon.social since tel: is extremely fraught, especially nowadays with insane phone spam etc, a Signal/WhatsApp/etc address might be a good alternative example?

I particularly like the "established encrypted messenger" example because the wf->[rel=messenger]-> lookup could get Fedi encrypted DMs "for free."

(obviously lots I'm glossing over that make it more complicated, but in theory it'd be less complicated than many alternatives)

@by_caballero @trwnh so _in theory_ PSTN operators could provide a lookup system, but it'd be jank af at best, and more likely it would be a horrendous unfixable security disaster.

@by_caballero @trwnh this would work except for the specific way that number portability is implemented. 😅 At least historically, and very likely still today, the "database" used to map phone numbers as assigned by exchange blocks (i.e., to a given carrier) to phone numbers that have been ported to a different carrier by the customer (under number portability laws) was a set of spreadsheets synchronized by FTP at intervals. Access to said "databases" is entirely contractual.

@trwnh@mastodon.social oh, totally. To be clear, the way I imagine it is that to end users, it all looks like a single identity, and which feed/stream is negotiated based on the context you're using the identity. So, e.g., my main public profile might be "blaine@bcook.ca", and if someone tried to follow me on mastodon, they'd get my "short text notes" stream, and if someone else tried to follow me from pixelfed they'd get my "square format insta-like-social photos" stream.

@trwnh@mastodon.social for sure; lots of ways to deal with the phone number lookup thing, but "security is hard" in that context 😅

aside: I did a little work a couple of years ago on a thing I was calling "NNS" (the "Name Name System") around how we might use modern cryptographic assertions to step back from the relatively "centralized" mode of DNS (and by proxy, webfinger and atproto's approach), but then IPFS etc imploded and the funding/interest dried up. There are some similar efforts out there, too.

@trwnh .. and *critically* for what I think you're saying, there's nothing preventing linking from a webfinger profile to e.g. a wiki or a webpage of any sort, or another identifier like a phone number or a signal account. Again, this is all stuff that informed the original design of webfinger, over 15 years ago now 🙈

@trwnh@mastodon.social lolsob. This is/was the whole point of webfinger ("It's DNS, for people") but the mastodon implementation kind of missed that part. But it's trivially possible to do that.

My ideal is to have one "personal address" [per life context, e.g., work, family, social, etc] that points to different stuff I'm sharing in different contexts, with tagging to indicate in which contexts it the various feeds/etc might be useful. e.g., a tech-focused mastodon feed, a pixelfed feed for family, etc.

@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.

@trwnh the "trick" with webfinger is that it's a way to go from a "name" to an authoritative context (the authority for "x@y.xyz"' is "y.xyz" and the authority for "blah.com" is "blah.com"; the challenge with phone numbers is that it's impossible to infer the authority for +1-416-867-5309 / telcos don't provide a lookup system). That's really it; the rest is a cultural thing.

@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 (useful stubs, and important, hard things to agree on – I don't want to diminish the work of folks on those aspects in any way! Just that I hope we don't limit our imaginations based on the standards of today)

@trwnh when the first round of "social networks" were built, the first thing that got added to the databases were a "users" and a "friends" table, because "the web" doesn't (didn't?) have that.

Decentralizing that is a radical act, and the sorts of things that we can do with a linked [bi-directional] web of people is infinite and bounded only by our imaginations. AS and AP actions and data formats and C2S are, as I think you're saying, just stubs for rebuilding the old world in a new way. ❤️

@trwnh linking, which as you point out is key – to people – depends on regular people being able to share their names. I learned a long time ago that most people aren't good at groking the HTTP part of links, because the structure of links is actually really complex. When you mention xmpp and email, the identifier is the thing that makes both of those networks work.

For me, "fedi" or "AP" or the social web or whatever we want to call it has always been about making personal identity linkable.

@trwnh@mastodon.social nice writeup! Just glancing, so without getting into detail, I think I agree.

This is perhaps my own bias in all of this, but it's interesting that one of the most-consistent aspect of Fedi implementations is their reliance on Webfinger.

I worked on that part because I didn't think the data format stuff really mattered that much, and at worst was going to be stifling. It was excluded from AP for political, http fundamentalist reasons, but [imho] is essential to the networks functioning.