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 technolog ...

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. 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 provide ...

, 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 A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic o ...

to various sites on the Internet. The WebFinger protocol is used by the federated social networks, such as GNU social, Diaspora, 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 We ...

. The protocol payload is represented in JSON 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