[TFortunato]

Is this because the finger protocol is defined such that it must use ASCII, and not UTF-8? (Honest question, have not used finger in a looooong time)

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1288#section-2.2

[Zababa]

I think that's more because they used bsd-finger and never patched it, while it was patched on other distributions. bsd-finger probably follows the RFC, but the RFC may not follow usage (especially since it's almost 30 years old now). According to wikipedia the first implementation of UTF-8 was made for Plan 9 in 1992.