WebFinger is a protocol specified by the Internet Engineering Task Force IETF that allows for discovery of information about people and things identified by a

URI Uri may refer to: Places * Canton of Uri, a canton in Switzerland * Úri, a village and commune in Hungary * Uri, Iran, a village in East Azerbaijan Province * Uri, Jammu and Kashmir, a town in India * Uri (island), an island off Malakula Islan ...

. Information about a person might be discovered via an acct: URI, for example, which is a URI that looks like an email address. WebFinger is specified as the discovery protocol for OpenID Connect, which is a protocol that allows one to more easily log in to various sites on the Internet. The WebFinger protocol is used by the federated social networks, such as GNU social,

Diaspora A diaspora ( ) is a population that is scattered across regions which are separate from its geographic place of origin. Historically, the word was used first in reference to the dispersion of Greeks in the Hellenic world, and later Jews after ...

, or Mastodon, to discover users on federated nodes and pods, as well as the remoteStorage protocol. As a historical note, the name "WebFinger" is derived from the old ARPANET Finger protocol, but it is a very different protocol designed for HTTP. The protocol payload is represented in

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other ser ...

format.

Example

Basic example with profile page and business card

Client request: GET /.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct%3Abob%40example.com HTTP/1.1 Host: example.com Server response:

Usage on Mastodon

On Mastodon, any federated servers can look up users by sending a request to the WebFinger endpoint on other servers. Here is an example for the user@[email protected]: Client request: GET /.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct%3AMastodon%40mastodon.social HTTP/1.1 Host: mastodon.social Server response:

References

External links

webfinger.net community site

WebFinger information and open source software

sabre/webfinger server implementation
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sabre.io

webfinger Cloudflare worker
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Kurt Seifried
{{Microblogging Internet protocols 2013 introductions

Example

Basic example with profile page and business card

Usage on Mastodon

See also

References

External links