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WebFinger is a
protocol Protocol may refer to: Sociology and politics * Protocol (politics), a formal agreement between nation states * Protocol (diplomacy), the etiquette of diplomacy and affairs of state * Etiquette, a code of personal behavior Science and technology ...
specified by the Internet Engineering Task Force
IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...
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 An email address identifies an email box to which messages are delivered. While early messaging systems used a variety of formats for addressing, today, email addresses follow a set of specific rules originally standardized by the Internet Engineer ...
. WebFinger is specified as the discovery protocol for
OpenID Connect OpenID is an open standard and decentralized authentication protocol promoted by the non-profit OpenID Foundation. It allows users to be authenticated by co-operating sites (known as relying parties, or RP) using a third-party identity provider ...
, which is a protocol that allows one to more easily
log in In computer security, logging in (or logging on, signing in, or signing on) is the process by which an individual gains access to a computer system by identifying and authenticating themselves. The user credentials are typically some form ...
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 A mastodon ( 'breast' + 'tooth') is any proboscidean belonging to the extinct genus ''Mammut'' (family Mammutidae). Mastodons inhabited North and Central America during the late Miocene or late Pliocene up to their extinction at the end of th ...
, 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 The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...
Finger protocol In computer networking, the Name/Finger protocol and the Finger user information protocol are simple network protocols for the exchange of human-oriented status and user information. Name/Finger protocol The Name/Finger protocol is based on Req ...
, but it is a very different protocol designed for
HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...
. 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@mastodon@mastodon.social: Client request: GET /.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct%3AMastodon%40mastodon.social HTTP/1.1 Host: mastodon.social Server response:


See also

*
Authorization Authorization or authorisation (see spelling differences) is the function of specifying access rights/privileges to resources, which is related to general information security and computer security, and to access control in particular. More for ...
*
IndieAuth IndieAuth is an open standard decentralized authentication protocol that uses OAuth 2.0 and enables services to verify the identity of a user represented by a URL as well as to obtain an access token that can be used to access resources under the c ...
*
OpenID OpenID is an open standard and decentralized authentication protocol promoted by the non-profit OpenID Foundation. It allows users to be authenticated by co-operating sites (known as relying parties, or RP) using a third-party identity provider ...
*
OpenID Connect OpenID is an open standard and decentralized authentication protocol promoted by the non-profit OpenID Foundation. It allows users to be authenticated by co-operating sites (known as relying parties, or RP) using a third-party identity provider ...
*
WebID WebID is a method for internet services and members to know who they are communicating with. The WebID specifications define a set oto prepare the process of standardization for identity, identification and authentication on HTTP-based networks. We ...


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