Dude! My name is on the…

Dude! My name is on the webfinger spec. I helped design it.

Webfinger is a REVERSE lookup. Profiles are a FORWARD lookup. They do different things.

You've raised a good point. How to provision and create a profile. Honestly after doign this for 15 years, I came to the conclusion by far the best way to do this, just to put it in the top level root of your storage. We had so much flexibility of where to put the profile for years in solid, and it caused lots of problems. Ill add an issue to this and text to the spec. This is actually a careful observation and I'm glad you spotted it.

I think what you're getting at is how to get machine readable data from user@host which powers remote storage?

The principle of authn-lite is that any auth system can work with it, and it provides a user. Now in solid that should be a URI. But often you're going to get a string of character. This could be urn:webid:uuid. What to do with user@host ?

Since webfinger is in place, we could reuse it. Though there's lots of better ways to do a reverse index (aka search).

webfinger could be added as a slip, and would make sense. It could be recommended in the default implemenations as SHOULD. Servers could implement webfinger too. Though I would personally prefer to modernize it.

Yes this can be compatible with AP and microfed, and of course notstr, as the whole thing was supposed to work togehter in the first place.

This spec should give everyone what they want.