internationalization

ActivityPub software usually (but not always!) uses a handle format defined by RFC 7033, Webfinger, which looks like username@domain.example. There’s a ActivityPub and Webfinger report from the Social Web Community Group that details how this interaction works.

All parts of this handle format can include non-ASCII Unicode characters, like accented Latin, Chinese, Arabic, or Hindi scripts. But it takes extra work, so users can’t count on non-ASCII characters being supported in their own or others’ software.

This is a problem for the Fediverse. Of the most-spoken human languages, only three primarily use only ASCII characters (English, Malaysian, Indonesian), for a total of about 500 million people. That means about 90% of humans use languages with non-Latin, or accented, character sets. We are missing an opportunity to include more people worldwide with internationalized handles with names, words and domains in their native languages.

Jim DeLaHunt @jdlh has been doggedly pursuing better support for internationalized Webfinger handles in ActivityPub. To this end, the Social Web Community Group started tracking Internationalized Webfinger Handle Adoption. Covering dozens of servers, clients, and libraries that implement ActivityPub, the tracker helps to discovery which software can interoperate with inclusive handles.

If you know of ActivityPub software that isn’t on this list, or that doesn’t have its adoption tracked (question mark in the matrix), please add an issue or open a PR in the ActivityPub Webfinger task force repository.