finger protocol?
posted: 2025-10-07
I'm cerious about this finger protocal. Just discovered it on JBanana's gemini capsule. After a little research looks like its history goes back to 1977 (way older then gemini 2019).
Seems you just need to open TCP port 79 and responce to requests with some simple text. Kinda of a retro profile page. As I'm playing with Gemini currently would be cool to link to my finger profile from my capsule homepage. Not sure if I should self-host this though. Getting the traffic to hit a container in my homelab Nomad cluster was hard enough for gemini, not sure I want to do that again for finger. Also would be cool to join a community of others. Maybe I'll try plan.cat
My finger profile
Plan.cat is pro, made it very easy to setup a finger and includes easy update from cli. Here is mine
I also wrapped the update code they provide in a shell script to make updating it easier.
#!/bin/sh set -e T=\`mktemp\` && curl -so $T https://plan.cat/\~travisshears && $EDITOR $T && \ curl -su travisshears -F "plan=<$T" https://plan.cat/stdin
More then just a profile it is a sort of public todo list. Super cool.
P.S.
Still working on getting code hosted on my personal git server nativly viewable here in my personal capsule.