Haha this is exactly me. That habit of losing the knowledge rapidly post investigation is something I'm trying to break, and that's part of the reason I banged out this blog post immediately after my itch was satisfied.
The "I have to tell people about this NOW" vibe also carried me through completing my website (just so I could publish this blog post)
Hey Thanks for reading, and I'm glad you found it interesting.
To my understanding, Webfinger provides a standard API for discovering the user profile details no matter the software running on the node.
For example,
$ curl https://programming.dev/.well-known/webfinger\?resource\=acct:[email protected] | jq
{
"subject": "acct:[email protected]",
"links": [
{
"rel": "http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page",
"type": "text/html",
"href": "https://programming.dev/u/snowe"
},
{
"rel": "self",
"type": "application/activity+json",
"href": "https://programming.dev/u/snowe",
"properties": {
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#type": "Person"
}
}
]
}
Glad you liked it! Thanks for reading ❤️
You are right that it does feel a little roundabout. My understanding is that webfinger converts from the username to the user profile url and image. This is useful during federation, and for generic fedi/activitypub clients because different Fedi software maps usernames and profiles differently.
For example, [email protected] will reside at lemmy.instance/u/user, while user @mastodon.instance will reside at mastodon.instance/user.
Fom some poking around, it seems that Lemmy does not properly support sending the profile image on Webfinger because I wasn't able to do it using the
relparameters that are mentioned in the spec.