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FediForum April 2026

Globally Inclusive Fediverse Handles (i.e. beyond simple Latin Script letters)

Topics Identity & accounts Protocols & standards

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

Participants who chose to record their names here:

Knowledge

Bookmarks

Forums and structures

Existing globally inclusive handles, services

Next steps

Notes

  • Introductions

  • Comment: homoglyph attacks are a risk

  • TranslateScience: Multilingual science

  • Identifier recommendations

  • Figure out how webfinger actually works for globally-inclusive handles. The binding spec to ActivityPub.

    • ATProto allows DNS or HTTPS resolution

      • DNS is a TXT record as _atproto.

      • HTTPS is a request to /.well-known/atproto-did

      • These are both bidirectionally verified, where the DID document MUST have the handle in the alsoKnownAs section.

    • For ActivityPub, we are missing a foundation of handles. There is no bidirectional link.

      • Because handles only came to ActivityPub via Webfinger being used by Mastodon, the only thing we have in ActivityPub are Actor IDs. There is a preferredUsername field on Actor, but it’s not intended for Handles

      • For proper verification we need a value in Actor objects that says “this is my handle”

  • For a given language or script, there’s a specification that governs what characters are allowed in domain names.

    • Exists in chinese, korean, japanese, arabic etc.

    • To prevent homoglyph attacks, we can detect mixed scripts in handles and domains to flag that as a potential attack.

  • FediMod FIRES, distribution of moderation advisories & recommendations

  • Internationalisation Classes for Unicode (ICU) library

  • \p code in regular expressions, for character ranges: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/RegExp#regular_expression_and_unicode_characters

  • Domain name registrars probably have written code to apply label generation rules to candidate domain name labels. Get a link to their work.

  • Mastodon software is “micro-blogging server”.

  • Recommendation to go to COSCOP and do this session.

  • Mastodon.jp does not run Mastodon software

  • dropped ActivityPub because it did not meet their needs.

  • There is a Sovereign Tech Agency fund for people interested in getting invovled in Standards work. Who is willing to do the standards work?

  • Social Web Commnity Working Group in W3C as institutional home.

  • How do competing social media support globally inclusive handles?

    • Meta: generally don’t use user names

    • Bluesky: should already support internationalised domain name. Here is what bluesky is currently doing: https://bsky.app/profile/xn--gckvb8fzb.com

    • Twitter: never supported internationalisation, and Fediverse continued that logic and reused the same limited libraries (specifically Mastodon did).

  • Is this an all-or-nothing thing, or can there be incremental progress?

    • Incremental areas of improvement:

      • User registration emails

      • Localisation of user interfaces

      • Hashtags

    • For handles, it is either all or nothing, with the caveat that other software might display your handle as punycode encoded

  • Open a bug report with Mastodon software about supporting globally inclusive handles

    • Older Mastodon servers had an “original sin” which used ASCII-only user name as “actor identifier”, which is hard to change

    • Newer versions of Mastodon software uses integer instead.