Does #mastodon support a root level domain handles yet?

[mbajur@mastodon.social]

Does #mastodon support a root level domain handles yet? Like, say, user having his AP-enabled single-user website under example.com having a @example.com handle instead of @something@example.com

#help #fedidev #fediverse #mastodev #activitypub #needhelp

[profpatsch@mastodon.xyz]

@mbajur I think we are trying to standardize instance actors in an FEP, but I haven't heard of pure domain actor names

[profpatsch@mastodon.xyz]

@mbajur maybe what you could try to do is serve your actor activity JSON from root, but I'd wager most webfinger implementations reject handles with an empty user part

[profpatsch@mastodon.xyz]

@mbajur it's also kind of hard to parse cleanly and securely because Mastodon uses @user@exanple.com and others user@example.com, so hard to distinguish what's domain and what @ you can ignore …

[mbajur@mastodon.social]

@Profpatsch I'm a bit confused on how to handle that in my upcoming AP project (@abelio) - every instance is a single-user instance and i'm currently using @domain.com@domain.com as a solution someone suggested to me a year ago but i find it a bit hacky and looking for a proper solution

[profpatsch@mastodon.xyz]

@mbajur Ah yes, I’ve seen many people with single-user instances use something like @me@named.domain, which is super unfortunate because quoting them will show “@me”.

I think what you want to do has a lot of value here … so I guess the steps are:

1) implement webfinger to resolve @domain to the one actor, and @user@domain to point *to the same actor* (so you can mention them on platforms that don’t yet implement the new style quotes)
2) Publish an FEP about this new webfinger extension

[profpatsch@mastodon.xyz]

@mbajur I’m just a little afraid of the case where you are replying to a toot that uses @domain nicks, because it might happen that they are dropped

It would be interesting to test whether mastodon links to people in replies by their href already, or whether it tries to do (cached) webfinger again when you hit reply, because if they use the href from the previous toot it could already work in replies.

[profpatsch@mastodon.xyz]

@mbajur The other problem, as you can see above with @me is that if mastodon finds a nick on the local server, they will link it automatically, though I think you could argue that this is a misfeature from past times (it does not even open a dropdown)

[profpatsch@mastodon.xyz]

@mbajur cc @silverpill

[silverpill@mitra.social]

@Profpatsch

Several options have been discussed in this fediverse-ideas issue:

https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fediverse-ideas/issues/23

@mbajur

i'm currently using @domain.com@domain.com as a solution someone suggested to me a year ago but i find it a bit hacky and looking for a proper solution

It's not a bad solution IMO.

Maybe @snarfed.org has some ideas on how to do it better because domain handles are popular on Bluesky

[profpatsch@mastodon.xyz]

@silverpill @mbajur @snarfed.org

For now webfinger is the place of authority for basically everyone, so it should support domain-only users.

I’m a bit skeptical about distributing authority between DNS and webfinger tbh, it’s yet another implementation surface and potential attack vector based on diffused responsibillity (what if webfinger and DNS are out of sync and a client only does webfinger? etc)

[clearlyclaire@mastodon.social]

@mbajur not currently, the `@user@domain` format is pretty deeply embedded in Mastodon's data model and UX