2026-10-24T09:17:13Z https://nostr.now Evan Prodromou https://nostr.now/npub1c6t07wcgd5qqapmcmt57eg05v996sn6q76xgh6ecyt8dcam8zads98hwrh https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/93c61ca8347f2552bffeff952b12250b4c8a15dfc8631e43f32a503fa35f37db?s=120&d=identicon&r=g https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/93c61ca8347f2552bffeff952b12250b4c8a15dfc8631e43f32a503fa35f37db?s=120&d=identicon&r=g https://nostr.now/nevent1qqsg9k0yhvuzv2scntejvr75x3p02rfy03t53arppv6vyk70c2yuc4gzyrrfdlemppksqr580rdwnm9p73s5h2z0grmgezlt8q3vahrhvut4k3srlqq ActivityPub software usually (but not always!) uses a handle format defined by [RFC 7033](<a href="https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7033.html">https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7033.html</a> ), 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.<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>Jim DeLaHunt <span itemprop="mentions" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a itemprop="url" href="/npub1sst9ked4cx52ldcmc5g8kdxnhwag23u7jzhucv3suq7ph37nvcmqs64hjt" class="bg-lavender dark:prose:text-neutral-50 dark:text-neutral-50 dark:bg-garnet px-1"><span>Jim DeLaHunt</span> (<span class="italic">npub1sst…4hjt</span>)</a></span> 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](<a href="https://swicg.github.io/activitypub-webfinger/internationalized">https://swicg.github.io/activitypub-webfinger/internationalized</a> ). Covering dozens of servers, clients, and libraries that implement ActivityPub, the tracker helps to discovery which software can interoperate with inclusive handles.<br/><br/>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](<a href="https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-webfinger">https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-webfinger</a> ). 2026-10-07T02:34:56Z