Problem mentioning a user (with certain domains)

[prolibre]

In Bookwyrm 0.7.4

A user of my instance has pointed out to me that in the attached example, one of the three users (the one with the domain lire.im) is not being mentioned correctly.

I should point out that all the accounts are those of mastodon users.

EDIT :

I'd like to add a clarification that I've just discovered. The problem seems to occur when the mastodon instance has two (sub) domains (in parallel): here @[email protected] refers to https://re.lire.im/@account

Thank you and have a nice sunday !

[hughrun]

The problem here is that https://lire.im forwards to https://re.lire.im so users at that domain have ambiguous usernames.

For example if we request https://lire.im/.well-known/webfinger/?resource=acct:[email protected] it will forward to https://re.lire.im/.well-known/webfinger/?resource=acct:[email protected], and then give us this:

{
  "subject":"acct:[email protected]",
  "aliases":["https://re.lire.im/@admin","https://re.lire.im/users/admin"],
  "links":[
    {
        "rel":"http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page",
        "type":"text/html",
        "href":"https://re.lire.im/@admin"
    },
    {  
        "rel":"self",
        "type":"application/activity+json",
        "href":"https://re.lire.im/users/admin"
    }, 
    {  
        "rel":"http://ostatus.org/schema/1.0/subscribe",
        "template":"https://re.lire.im/authorize_interaction?uri={uri}"
    },
    { 
        "rel":"http://webfinger.net/rel/avatar",
        "type":"image/png",
        "href":"https://re.lire.im/system/accounts/avatars/108/318/983/298/108/639/original/85c1d453ddfc458c.png"
    }
  ]
}

Notice that this is a webfinger request for [email protected] but the value for self is https://re.lire.im/users/admin.

This creates a problem at our end because we will end up with a local user [email protected], NOT [email protected]. Then when you mention [email protected], find_mentions will correctly identify that this is the user you meant, and return the canonical username:

    for username in not_found:
        mention_user = handle_remote_webfinger(username, unknown_only=True) # this will find the existing user but not return them because "unknown_only=True".
        if not mention_user:
            # this user is blocked or can't be found
            continue

This is tricky to solve and to be honest I think libre.im is doing the wrong thing here. For example there's no "alsoKnownAs" or any other value set at https://re.lire.im/users/admin.json which might indicate that @[email protected] is the same account as @[email protected].

[prolibre]

@hughrun

It seems to be somehow implemented in mastodon because I had the same problem with a large provider (sciences.re). The account @contact@sciences.re <> social.sciences.re/@contact
And the mention of the user @[email protected] works from my instance (piaille.fr) mais pas depuis bookwyrm.
Well, it's not an urgent point, but it's intriguing all the same :-)

Have a nice evening.

[cemreefe]

@prolibre is correct that mastodon allows mentioning by what I call "a fediverse alias", which is a parallel webfinger that points to the same account. see https://cemrekarakas.com/.well-known/webfinger that points to my real account on mastodon.social. This means anyone tagging @<random>@cemrekarakas.com, will see their mention changed to @[email protected].

The way to go about this is; for an object with reference to a potential account, check webfinger. If webfinger resolves to an actor that points to its valid webfinger on the same domain, replace the handle with the webfinger-verified handle.