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Hah, those were the days. I remember using finger in the late 90s/early 00s to figure out whether people were at the computer club before I walked across campus for lunch :)

You mean “to finger out”. ;)

Is there an aggregator for fingers? So it becomes more RSS or like twitter in format?

the home pages of happynetbox.com and plan.cat have a list of recent updates. It's worth saving them as bookmarks on your Finger client.

finger://@happynetbox.com

finger://@plan.cat

Unfortunately finger.farm only has that feature available on its web mirror, but not on its native finger-protocol home page.

In addition to those, over time I have also bookmarked some individual profiles, like this one which is one of my favourites

finger://blast-rules@happynetbox.com

Oh and also, in case you want to check the weather around the world:

finger://@graph.no (web version: https://graph.no/ )

There's a protocol called 'WebFinger':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebFinger

Just in case someone from the '90s was working at drpepper.com, I remember fingering them and someone had some amazing scrolling ascii art of betty boop IIRC. So much good ascii art on there, actually.

I 'member.

At university we used finger.

I made my .plan file an ASCII art video version of the famous shot from Terminator 2 of the terminator doing a death-defying motorcycle jump into the draught channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0pCE0N-EF0

The sysops politely emailed me, asking me to change it, citing bandwidth usage. It was about 800kb.

I implemented a finger "daemon" in an interface engine and use it as a gateway for a variety of services (weather, including my local WS, Plex info, etc).

It's a super simple format, and does the job perfectly.

Any resources for (ideally interactive) introduction to Finger? Apart from the wikipedia page.

I wish there was more info about Finger on the web.

You can learn more about the protocol by reading RFC 1288, obviously that's not interactive at all though.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1288

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