Internationalisation of "handles" on the fediverse, fresh from #fediforum
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swicg/2026May/0001.html
Post
Replies:
4
@jdlh It does beget the question: how do you standardise to fix a problem in something you don't technically have? Handles are a design construct in the fediverse and not actually a protocol concept.
@thisismissem is a webfinger resource but doesn't appear in Actor objects, and is instead constructed from preferredUsername and the webfinger domain. Handles don't exist in ActivityPub, but almost all ActivityPub software has some concept of them.
@jdlh oh, and it gets even worse with this tidbit of history from @by_caballero
“P.S. Adding to the tech debt/specification backlog, `preferredUsername` was never in ActivityStreams, it was yolo'd/retconned, and One Does Not Simply yolo new terms into the ontology without the whole W3C normative 3-step.”
@thisismissem @jdlh @by_caballero it comes from Portable Contacts, which Mastodon used to include in its Atom feeds. Annoyingly, the actual structure for this in PoCo is account, which can be plural.
https://portablecontacts.github.io/draft-spec.html
