It kind of makes me think of how odd it would have been if many of the old forums named themselves like bookclub.phpbulletin.com, metalheads.vbulletin.net, or something.
There’s nothing wrong with doing that, obviously, but it’s struck me as another interesting quirk of fediverse instances/sites. Generally as soon as you visit them you can tell by the site interface or an icon somewhere what software they’re using.
That’s basically what SRV records accomplish. When I looked a while back to see if ActivityPub had support/plans to support them, I landed on, I think, a Mastaton feature request where the response was “won’t implement SRV” because “webfinger already does that” (it does not).
Personally, I think SRV records and webfinger solve different problems and can complement each other. The ActivityPub software would lookup the SRV record matching its platform and use the result from that to query the correct webfinger endpoint to resolve the user’s URI for that platform.
I have no idea why SRV records seem to have fallen out of fashion, but they would easily solve the delegation problem since that’s exactly what they were designed for. lol
So much yes. You’d think that’d be the first thing they’d bake in the ActivityPub spec, given it governs how the user handles are handled, they even look like E-Mail addresses. Yet nobody seems to have thought about making the usernames sane. It’s the first thing I looked up while setting my Lemmy, can I make the username look less stupid, as I did with Matrix when I set that one up.
There’s a weird trend towards stuffing everything as HTTP(S) web APIs and JSON. We’re about to get to a point where everything will talk over websockets because we forgot TCP exists.
Ha, one of my biggest pet peeves is developers poorly re-inventing a wheel that already exists as a standard.