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FediForum October 2025:

Globally-inclusive Fediverse Handles (i.e. non-ASCII)

/2025-10/session/2-e/

Topics:

Convener: Jim DeLaHunt (@jdlh@mstdn.ca)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

Website: https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-webfinger/issues/29

Notes

Intros/table-setting

  • unattributed: I’m mainly curious about: Does webfinger need to be tightly coupled to Fediverse? Why not domain names as handles.
    • but ASCII imperialism is also important!
  • Emelia: I’ve been adapting some bluesky/AT Protocol technologies for activitypub, trying to separate identity and data from applications. Using bluesky-like handles and portability detached from fediverse platform.
    • fun fact, masto uses extremely similar logic to Twitter in the code for how handl
    • Hong Minhee from fedify is active within the Korean and Japanese communities, and has advocated for some work to better support those communities
  • jm: work on federated software, would love to know why unicode isn’t already standard everywhere?

Discussion

  • jdlh: domain names already have non-ascii domain names (per URL spec) but mastodon software is restricting that to ASCII only– why?
    • em: could use punycode for domains; but trickling that through to all the different parts of the software (has to work in UX, in moderation/blocklist backend, in UX for moderation (userside and moderator side), etc)
      • backstory: lots of moderation attacks, i.e. homoglyph attacks (mastodon.soc1al with a turkish dotless i or whatever)
    • em: same problem for the username - some dB wants the dB to be UTF-8 only, ascii-only, etc
      • partic since lots of usernames used as primary keys
      • ruby also janky with UTF-8 specifically, i’d imagine in some languages
      • libicu (via charlock holmes) which parses the UTF-8 strs in messages; common cause of install/setup headaches because libicu is native but needs to be updated in lockstep with gems; fedify has an easier time here because javascript natively supports UTF8 in strings well.
  • JDLH: consider the frame around pros and cons.
    • For us in Latin-script culture, ASCII works pretty well, i18n gives us few pros and many cons
    • For someone in another culture and another script, i18n gives them huge pros and the cons are not so great.
  • jdlh: how make homoglyph detection visible? who’s thinking about this in UX?
    • Metamask, cryptocurrency service, they have a huge homoglyph problem which leads to fraud. Their head of UX cares about fraud prevention.
    • The DNS people (ICANN) have come up with rules for what characters can be used in domain. Called Label Generation Rules.
    • RFC 9839 Unicode Character Repertoire Subsets https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9839.html might be advice on limits to identifiers.
  • BF: It would be good to have a really good implementation as a role model.
    • JDLH: Agree. The people using the non-Latin usernames will be using good software.
    • Then pay somene to do the PR on the Mastodon code.
    • em: it may be hard to find, because everyone wants to federate with Mastodon software.
  • em: Mastodon includes user name in the identifier for federation. This is an anti-pattern, because you can’t change your username. Mastodon now allows, for new accounts, identifiers apart from user name.
  • bf: you need to change all of it at once.
  • em: demonstration of the indirection between handles and data storage and did (decentralized identifiers) which are globally unique values, e.g. did:plc: and did:web:
  • em: The lemmy software has communities, and they share a handle namespace. This conflicts with Mastodon.
  • jdlh: inherit the work from ICANN and domain localization?
    • bf: one random precedent: https://discuss.ens.domains/t/ens-name-normalization-2nd/14564/3
    • em: maybe start with a primer as groundtruth/reference?
      • JDLH is willing to try. em can provide resources for writing those document. Use respec for W3C documents. Venue: FEP or W3C?
      • bf: https://www.punycoder.com/idn/ ?
      • bf: FEP might be an easier forum than W3C?
      • bf: Scope of document might be spelling out user stories and desired outcomes. Audience is the implementor who can satisfy all those user stories in their own implementation.
    • JDLH: since I am aware of some of the prior art from ICANN etc., I will attempt a paper listing this prior art for the benefit of Fediverse people.
  • bf: suggest write a use-case FEP and send to the SWICG mailing list next week. This starts a conversation.
  • em: suggest that if we can decouple user handle from identity from applications, we get to a better world. May be best to advocate for that big breaking change, rather than a smaller breaking change.

Other weird handle FEPs: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/e3e9/fep-e3e9.md

Weird things with webfinger: https://correct.webfinger-canary.fietkau.software/

EVAN FROM THE FUTURE: https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-webfinger/issues/29

This is on the agenda for the Social CG.