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The secret life of .well-known
(ishan.page)
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Hey Thanks for reading, and I'm glad you found it interesting.
To my understanding, Webfinger provides a standard API for discovering the user profile details no matter the software running on the node.
For example,
You are right that it does feel a little roundabout. My understanding is that webfinger converts from the username to the user profile url and image. This is useful during federation, and for generic fedi/activitypub clients because different Fedi software maps usernames and profiles differently.
For example, user@lemmy.instance will reside at lemmy.instance/u/user, while user @mastodon.instance will reside at mastodon.instance/user.
Fom some poking around, it seems that Lemmy does not properly support sending the profile image on Webfinger because I wasn't able to do it using the
rel
parameters that are mentioned in the spec.