Strypey
@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

"But under the hood, the protocol doesn’t use full mentions at all. Instead, it uses actor IDs."

The actor ID for my main account is mastodon.social/users/crepels. In my case, there is a direct translation between the full mention and the actor ID, but that doesn’t have to be the case."

@crepels, 2023

seb.jambor.dev/posts/understan

Intriguing. So in theory, the Actor ID for a fediverse account could also be represented in an app as @username@email.service or @username@xmpp.service 🤔
Strypey
@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

Anyone who boosted this post may have noticed me edit it to remove the leading @ from both my examples, then edit it again to put them back, and wondered why.

My first thought in formatting those examples was what I edited to; using existing identifiers. But then I thought, how would that affect the UX of someone using a standard app to @mention them? So I changed it to what I posted.

But I'm really just trying to explore what would happen if we abandoned WebFinger for another ID format. So...