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1. Embed this notice
   Jesse Vincent (jesse@metasocial.com)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 04:05:58 JST Jesse Vincent

   • Evan Prodromou

   @evan Honestly, I'd love for it to be possible for it to be <name>.<tld>.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@prodromou.pub)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 04:05:57 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     @jesse it is!

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@prodromou.pub)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 04:10:54 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • Joel D

     @joeld @jesse It's possible to have Webfinger identities for the main domain, which use home pages and ActivityPub streams on a different hostname. So you could have your Web pages at <something>.<name>.<tld> but all the Webfinger addresses could be <user>@<name>.<tld>

   • Embed this notice
     Joel D (joeld@tilde.zone)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 04:11:01 JST Joel D

     in reply to

     • Evan Prodromou

     @jesse @evan it’s possible but then where does the org put their actual website, which vastly more people are going to be looking for?

   • Embed this notice
     Jesse Vincent (jesse@metasocial.com)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 04:11:02 JST Jesse Vincent

     in reply to

     • Evan Prodromou

     @evan Then that's the right answer.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@prodromou.pub)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 04:13:32 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • Joel D

     @joeld @jesse The problem is that some programmers just do text manipulation on the Webfinger addresses instead of doing the work of discovering the important info. This is a bugfeature of Webfinger.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@prodromou.pub)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 04:15:15 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • Joel D

     @joeld @jesse I should probably accio @blaine at this point

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@prodromou.pub)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 05:22:46 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • Gergely Nagy ?
     • Joel D

     @joeld @algernon @jesse

     Webfinger!

     https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc7033/

     https://webfinger.net/

   • Embed this notice
     Joel D (joeld@tilde.zone)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 05:22:48 JST Joel D

     in reply to

     • Gergely Nagy ?
     • Evan Prodromou

     @algernon @jesse @evan what exactly is the mechanism by which @<user>@company.com “points to” anything other than the server at company.com ?

   • Embed this notice
     Gergely Nagy ? (algernon@trunk.mad-scientist.club)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 05:22:52 JST Gergely Nagy ?

     in reply to

     • Evan Prodromou
     • Joel D

     @joeld @jesse @evan You can have your instance wherever, and have @<user>@<name>.<tld> point there. For wherever, I'd go with something like fedi or social. Definitely not Mastodon (because if you ever change server software, you can't use Mastodon as the hostname due to its trademark), and not any other software name, either.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@prodromou.pub)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 05:23:33 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • Gergely Nagy ?
     • Joel D

     @joeld @algernon @jesse If you're familiar with Internet email, it's kind of like the MX record for defining a mail server for a domain.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@prodromou.pub)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 07:26:56 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • Gergely Nagy ?
     • Joel D

     @joeld @algernon @jesse

     Absolutely! It's a really elegant system.

     I think there was a plan at one point to use SRV records in DNS as a way to find the right server to query for Webfinger, but it was too complex and didn't end up in the final spec.

   • Embed this notice
     Joel D (joeld@tilde.zone)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 07:26:58 JST Joel D

     in reply to

     • Gergely Nagy ?
     • Evan Prodromou

     @evan @algernon @jesse kvetching aside, thanks for explaining it to me!

   • Embed this notice
     Joel D (joeld@tilde.zone)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 07:26:59 JST Joel D

     in reply to

     • Gergely Nagy ?
     • Evan Prodromou

     @evan @algernon @jesse OK I see, except it’s really not like MX at all. It’s not handled via DNS but by making sure your web server is set up to redirect certain HTTP requests. (Good luck if your domain points at something like Wix or Squarespace?) It would have been a lot simpler if they had used a DNS-based approach instead.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@prodromou.pub)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 08:06:59 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • Gergely Nagy ?
     • Joel D
     • Steve

     @steve @jesse @joeld @algernon You should probably read the spec.

   • Embed this notice
     Steve (steve@mastodon.tech)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 08:07:06 JST Steve

     in reply to

     • Gergely Nagy ?
     • Evan Prodromou
     • Joel D
     • Steve
     @evan @joeld @algernon @jesse
     Maybe I'm not understanding something about this, but if I do a webfinger redirect from my domain (say, @me@stevebate.net) to @steve isn't the latter still going to be my "real" federation identity? My posts will still be published using the mastodon.tech instance address, right?
     admin likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     admin (admin@mastodon.tech)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 09:16:52 JST admin

     in reply to

     • Gergely Nagy ?
     • Evan Prodromou
     • Joel D
     • Steve

     I think so

   • Embed this notice
     Steve (steve@mastodon.tech)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 09:47:35 JST Steve

     in reply to

     • Gergely Nagy ?
     • admin
     • Evan Prodromou
     • Joel D
     @admin @algernon @evan @jesse @joeld I've read the WebFinger spec and it seems like it could *theoretically* do what we're discussing, but unless an instance has code to implement a proxy for the external account alias, I don't see how it would work in practice.
     admin likes this.