Finger.Farm: Modern Finger Protocol Hosting / Working Finger Protocol Examples

Finger.Farm is the world’s only open source hosting for the Finger protocol. Built primarily as a tech demo for the jr devs on my team who’d never experienced the joys of the ASCII era and shared unix boxes, Finger.Farm is a look back through Internet history into another era.

For the most part, the finger client is still pre-installed on modern operating systems. There just aren’t many working finger protocol addresses left in the wild.

Working through this project over the course of a rare rainy weekend in Scottsdale, AZ, I’m amazed at how many core ideas so central to the Internet — live status, blogging, IoT, etc… were really there from the beginning. The rest was just elaborating on those basic themes.

Clever folks, those Internet pioneers.

Finger never really made the jump to the “modern” era — it didn’t support SSL, easy DNS discoverability, or formatted responses like JSON. The Morris Worm probably didn’t help.

Attempts to update the concept — WebFinger comes to mind — never really went anywhere.

Ultimately, was it just the name that held back finger?

Anyway, hope you enjoy another one of my ridiculous weekend projects. PRs to the Finger.Farm repo are more than welcome. Some of these concepts will probably come back in a later project, but for now, it’s just something fun for people to play with

Stack is:

• Node JS / Express / Passport JS
• SQLite

Uhhh… buy some emoji domains!