WebFinger

WebFinger is a protocol specified by the Internet Engineering Task Force IETF in RFC 7033 that allows for discovery of information about people and things identified by a URI.

WebFinger is specified as the discovery protocol for OpenID Connect,[2] which is a protocol that allows one to more easily log in to various sites on the Internet.

[3] The WebFinger protocol is used by federated software, such as GNU social,[citation needed] Diaspora,[4] or Mastodon,[5] to discover users on federated nodes and pods, as well as the remoteStorage protocol.

[6] As a historical note, the name "WebFinger" is derived from the old ARPANET Finger protocol, but it is a very different protocol designed for HTTP.

[7] The protocol payload is represented in JSON format.