Should Profiles be discoverable without the aid of a content indexer? A Profile link type could be specified as User Data that references a URL and hash. In effect, we would be moving Profile announcements from offline batches to User Data.

Pros:

• Better alignment with usage patterns expected in social media.
• Ability for applications to navigate to profile without the aid of other services.

Cons:

• Higher storage cost for consensus system.

Rejected design option:

• Putting user-generated "speech" content directly in a consensus system is an anti-goal of DSNP for legal risk reasons as well as technical storage requirement concerns.

Adjacent concerns:

• The ability to derive a current URL for a Profile could be used by applications to activate Mention tags without outside knowledge; cf. DIP-266 Activity Content "Mention" alignment #266
• Mastodon uses Person instead of Profile, though most of the fields have overlapping semantics.

Linked PR:

• DIP-267 Provide a User Data mechanism for links to profiles #277