Notices by Wiktor Kwapisiewicz (wiktor@metacode.biz)

Just for completeness there was a web+mastodon URI scheme in the use years ago but it got removed: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/6255

The tl;dr is that URI schemes have bad fallbacks on the web. If the user doesn’t have an app installed then either the browser doesn’t do anything (it’s bad), shows error page (worse) or a chooser (which, in case of no app installed, also doesn’t help).

acct URI scheme is internally used by WebFinger if someone searches for accounts using the @account@example.com text.

Sorry for not offering anything actionable 😓

S/MIME has two problems: it’s harder to get a free certificate (Let’s Encrypt for S/MIME could really help here) and, AFAIK, it still technically is not using modern cryptographic cipher suites (e.g. no AEAD).

It would be cool to know these problems are being resolved.

FWIW in my experience S/MIME is also quite well supported in e-mail clients. Additionally due to centralized CA nature there are no questions whether the certificate is good or not.

Just for the record: it’s still possible to get a free S/MIME cert nowadays e.g. https://www.actalis.com/s-mime-certificates — not affiliated, but checked it today and got a valid one, it’s still a bit of a hassle clicking through the forms there :-/

If it would be more convenient I guess regular people wouldn’t mind it being centralized. The same way as domain TLS certificate authorities operate now.

As for PGP, the current “schism” where GnuPG forked OpenPGP into their own, proprietary https://librepgp.org/ won’t help the interoperability, I’m afraid :(