For those who didn't know or don't remember what the finger protocol was:
> The program would supply information such as whether a user is currently logged-on, e-mail address, full name etc. As well as standard user information, finger displays the contents of the .project and .plan files in the user's home directory.
The idea of showing a real name, email address and logged in status, without the explicit consent of that person, is completely incompatible with a modern understanding of trust.
But a small protocol to find out what someone is up to, available on demand, well that would be nice.
The key difference between this and something like twitter, is that firstly it's a first class protocol, there isn't a twitter protocol and you can't implement a twitter server and twitter client independently, but more importantly, it's pull not push.
You're not being pushed notifications when someone updates their .project or .plan. You're not being pushed a feed of "recommended users". You simply ask for someone's .plan and get served it.
Can you recreate that functionality with nothing more than HTTP and an index page? Yes, of course, and this is one such attempt, but until we have a simple client, shipped on most machines, where I could simply type the equivalent of "finger jcarmac@id.net", and get back a short burst of a dozen or so lines, then it won't feel the same.
Of course money ruins everything too, it wouldn't be enough to provide such a thing, because people would far too quickly start having space reserved to advertising. There's too many eyeballs leading to too much money chasing those eyeballs.
A handful of academics have a chance to push back and shun someone who tries to advertise on their usenet newsgroup. There's zero chance of that happening to anyone on any new platform now.
Any platform that gets popular enough to "take off" will all too quickly be taken over by people who optimise for eyeballs, monetise those eyeballs and reinvest money into chasing more eyeballs.
And that's a core "problem" with this project and projects like it. It's a social problem, not a technological one. The technology was solved in the 1970s.