@notclacke @nightpool @schmittlauch Yes, I suspect/hope as the AP network grows, reliance on webfinger will decrease, including its current use in role of what shouldn't really apply for some federation stuff

@cwebber @notclacke @schmittlauch right now the main issue we had with URIs was their fragility—people switching between http/https and people switching between pleroma and mastodon were two major practical issues we ran into a lot that led us to privileging webfinger over URIs.

the second reason is ideological. Mastodon is microblogging, which means (to us) that posts are plain, not rich text. if actors exist in the network that can't be @-mentioned, then that's a huge user expectation problem

@nightpool @notclacke @schmittlauch I understand the frustration with http and https. Have you ever seen Tim Berners-Lee's "Web Security - TLS Everywhere, not https: URIs"?

https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Security-NotTheS.html

His argument is, of course we should have a cryptographic layer, but we shouldn't have two different uri schemes for the same resource served as unencrypted/encrypted... instead, there should be one uri scheme, and the encryption selection bit should be a protocol negotiation concern. I 100% agree.

@cwebber I was thinking about that TLS thing this morning. Ultimately it papers over the problems of mutability though

@nightpool what problems of mutability?

@nightpool http(s) has problems with mutability all around anyway :)

@nightpool @cwebber @notclacke @schmittlauch Why can't/aren't URIs dereferenced somehow? If properly dereferenced, then shouldn't the URI no longer matter?

@dansup @nightpool Well, Webfinger isn't specifically OStatus related, but yeah that's why Mastodon has it.

Evan Prodromou, who I think was responsible for Webfinger in OStatus, was one of the bigger voices pushing back against it appearing in ActivityPub, saying there's no need for it in a modern federated system IIRC from the SocialWG calls

@dansup @nightpool Or rather, was pushing back against it being a *requirement* (not against implementations optionally supporting it)

@dansup @nightpool You could absolutely have a Mastodon-like interface without Webfinger btw... type @, and it brings up a list of possible recipients which might not even be the webfinger addresses but people who match this in their name who are in your "addressbook"... mastodon already does this mostly. If I type "@karen" I can complete @aldeka even though she has a different username. Pump.io clients use this to select the user's id, but link with their display name as the link text

@cwebber @dansup @nightpool It means you need a rich-text editor to be able to mention someone.

@gargron @cwebber @dansup yes this is what I was saying about plaintext vs rich text.

@gargron @dansup @nightpool various pump.io clients have dynamic completion of the username but use markdown in composition... rich-text rendering, but not rich-text editors

@gargron @dansup @nightpool I personally hate markdown kind of but that's not relevant to this ;)

@Gargron @cwebber @nightpool Oh, I get it. I wasn't sure what nightpool meant about UX. Thanks for clearing this up!