Fist Protocol

Design

The fist protocol is inspired by the finger protocol and the ways which finger was used people.

finger is said to have be created back in 1971.

I was using finger in the 1990s — and maintained my own finger (.plan) file. Back then, my finger (.plan) file contained:

contact information,
URLs to my presence on other parts of the Internet,
a short biography,
a journal,
articles,
jokes,
a bunch of ASCII art.

I stored all that information in separate files, which were compiled into a finger .plan file.

Back then I (and I suspect most people) accessed finger from a terminal or terminal emulator, connected to a Unix system, by invoking command similar to:

finger username

(Here username would be replaced by the person's username on that Unix system.

So, for example:

finger joeblow

Or:

finger dariush

Finger Protocol Advantages

Some desirable qualities of the 1970s era finger protocol are:

✅ it is a human-legible protocol
- rather than just a programmer-legible or machine-legible protocol
✅ the protocol is simple enough for even a more junior software developer to be able to understand it
✅ the protocol and default data-format are simple enough for a competent software developer to be able to create a (simple) working client as a weekend project
- ✅ if the default data-format is dumped to a terminal or terminal emulator it is human-legible
✅ the protocol is simple enough for a competent software developer to be able to create a (simple) working server as a weekend project
✅ all of a (single) user's content is provided as a single download
✅ a client could make a request from a server for a user who is not (necessarily) local to that server
✅ key-value pairs which are in a format that is human-legible, programmer-legible, and machine-legible.

Finger Protocol Disadvantages

Some undesirable qualities of the 1970s era finger protocol are:

when a client receives a response from a server, it does not know whether it received all the data or not, as, for example, the network connection could have been disconnected prematurely, but there is no way to detect this,
there is no tamper detection,
there is no way to determine whether the finger (.plan) file was actually from the user whose content was requested,
there is no privacy,
the entire finger (.plan) file must be download each time, even if the exact same finger (.plan) file was previously downloaded,
identity is strictly tied to an Internet domain,
there is no official way of segmenting the download (into sub-pages).

reiver/fist-protocol

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