Finger protocol server in Swift

I’m writing a finger client as a fun little side project. This is a retro and probably near dead internet protocol but I do think it’s one of those quite useful and nice little things the internet used to have.

So in order to not be a pest, I had some fairly basic use cases I wanted to test (basically a single user look-up) so I’ve written quick and rough implementation. It’s not perfect but I thought I’d share it for those that might want to learn more either about finger or simply handling TCP requests in Swift.

You can find the code on GitHub. If you would like to get into this retro “social network” you can set up an account on happynetbox.com and experiment.

Finger has its problems as it assumed a certain level of trust and therefore was not private enough but that’s something that is easily fixed by doing something similar to what I’ve done or what you’ll find on happynetbox.com. Perhaps one day it might see a resurgence in popularity.