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Add WebFinger to your site

WebFinger is used to discover information about people or other entities on the Internet that are identified by a URI using standard Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) methods over a secure transport.

WebFinger.net

Usage

Used extensively in mastodon and federation sites.

Minimal example:

{
  "subject": "acct:boo@rocker.boo"
}

Subject is used to identify who the site is about.

acct

acct is one of other options (http, https, mailto) but is the most supported. To be able to interact with you they use this string to look up. For example we would take the second part and then check the WebFinger for the boo part of that acc.

Find more information on The ‘acct’ URI Scheme.

Request

Other sites then access your WebFinger through the following URI.

https://rocker.boo/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:boo@rocker.boo

The resource parameter is how we can look up other accounts on the same site. In cases where it’s your site or blog, we only have 1 account so we can keep this static.

Example

Let’s look at the WebFinger on this site.

{
  "subject": "acct:dave@davelage.com",
  "links": [
    {
      "rel": "http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page",
      "type": "text/html",
      "href": "https://davelage.com/about"
    },
    {
      "rel": "http://webfinger.net/rel/avatar",
      "type": "image/jpeg",
      "href": "https://davelage.com/face-640.jpg"
    },
    {
      "rel": "alternate",
      "type": "application/rss+xml",
      "href": "https://davelage.com/posts/index.xml"
    }
  ]
}

Can see the links for various pages based on WebFinger rel standards. This can be used to fill out your information as context. Additionally we can add our RSS feed to this.

This allows us to be discoverable across the federation and can be referenced in posts and searched for on the network.

You can take this to the next level and support ActivityPub too which would allow your site to interact with the federated services.

Find more information on the WebFinger spec.