FOSSDLE PieFedCelebrities will never adopt the Fediverse until usernames are centralized.
submitted by Lost_My_Mind
Because let's say you're Tom Hanks. And you get TomHanks@Lemmy.World
Well, what's stopping someone else from adopting TomHanks@Lemm.ee?
And some platforms minimize the text size of platform, or hide it entirely. So you just might see TomHanks, and think it's him. But it's actually a 7 year old Chinese boy with a broken leg in Arizona.
Because anyone can grab the same name, on a different platform.
There's over 1400 people solely in the US named Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks The Celebrity does not get patent rights or trademarks or copyrights on the name.
Wanna know which is the Tom Hanks The Celebrity? Check if their profile is authenticated against their personal website, à-la-Mastodon.
Celebrities are going to be shocked when they hear about email
I don't think it's a huge deal, we'll either know they're legit or not. Care to weigh in @MargotRobbie@lemmy.world ?
Didn't she just have a baby?
Yes, but you see. Lemmy users generally don't give a flat fuck about what celebrities want.
If you are that famous or worried about trademark, you shouldn't be using someone else's server. Tom Hanks can just buy e.g
tomhanks.actordomain and set up the@me@tomhanks.actorAP actor.I keep repeating this: the weird part is that we still have all these companies and institutions being okay with depending on someone else's namespace. Having the NYT still announcing their Twitter or Instagram for social media presence is the same as using aol.com for their email.
Never heard of email
The fix for this is for the guilds and unions that represent these celebrities to spin up their own instances. The suffix of the username granting the legitimacy.
It would solve the issue for people who look into it. But what if I registered AstralPath@Lemmy.World? I could pretend to be you. And because most people won't check, I'd get away with it until people caught on.
Now if you make your living off your public image, and I say horrible things, your career could take a hit. Even if nothing I said is true, and its proven it was never you.
People will just remember "Hey, remember that time AstralPath admitted to having sex with their grandmother?"
"No, that wasn't actually them."
"Are you sure? I remember reading about it in (insert tabloid here)".
And suddenly you have a legit reason not to use a platform that easily ruins your career through no fault of your own.
People will ALWAYS attempt to troll online for the memes. Remember Boaty McBoatface?
If your email address is lostmymind@outlook.com, what prevents someone to create lostmymind@gmail.com and pretend to be you?
If it was widely known that outlook was the legitimate suffix, there's no need to worry about this. If SAG-AFTRA had their own instance then any actor's account username associated with it would carry the suffix chosen by SAG-AFTRA.
TomHanks@sag-aftra.com for example.
TomHanks@lemmy.ml would be instantly recognizable as illegitimate.
This problem already exists in many different forms and is already managed well by the fact that celebrities' real usernames are well known and bullshit posts from accounts trying to fake them are easily caught just by looking at the user name. There are plenty of parody accounts on X with very similar username formats. Is that a major problem for X users? Not from what I've seen.
A difference between kbin (and mbin?) vs lemmy (and pyfedi) - the former would show the entire name, including instance. If instance was not included, it was because it was local (so you could assume '@kbin.social')
On lemmy/pyfedi the name shows up alone - though you can hover over and see the instance name. But at a glance I can see how someone could get confused. Not the best UX IMHO.
That's a feature, not a bug. Celebrity culture needs to get in the sea.
I presume I'm supposed to care, but I dont, and I don't know why anyone would.
The other night 337K people all registered to vote, simply because Taylor Swift sent one message on instagram.
People come to the platforms FOR the celebrities. And that's just ONE celebrity. The more celebrities on the platform, the more fanbases come with it.
But celebrities are picky. If they think something will hurt their image, they won't do it. Even if theres minimal chance it hurts their image. They have to be protective.
So they need assurance that when they post something, there's zero chance someone else could be posting "as them". Ironically enough, that was the original purpose of twitters blue checkmark.
Fuck the celebrities. They aren't your people, peers, or friends. They adopt platforms only when they determine they can make a buck from it. They're the kids that break your new toys, and you're suggesting we keep inviting them over to play.
They will only bring enshittification. Having a platform that isn't celebrity friendly is a boon.
With the celebrities come their followers. Which is like 97% of the world. I'm trying to get that 97% to adopt the fediverse.
But they don't come on their own. They go where their celebrities go. The celebrities bring content for their followers to consume.
This is sounding like don_dickle2.0
I like that everyone knows that person
Was Don_Dickle banned or something?
You're arguing quantity over quality. I do not care the least for bootstrapped growth at the detriment of the platform. I also do not care about people who idolize and platform hop in order to follow celebrities. I suspect very few will bring with them value beyond increased traffic.
If you want this, Reddit is still an option available to you.
Quantity is quality, if you have good filters in place.
I never understood people that argue something is bad by looking at the median case. The problem of Reddit, Twitter and Facebook is not due to the amount of people they have, and they were absolutely fine until they tried to exploit their userbases.
(Aside for @blaze@feddit.org: see what I mean about Fedi's anti-growth and reactionary culture? Our friend here is not an isolated case)
Right now Lemmy has something like 16K users, and a few hundred instances. Most of which are small instances hosting less than 10 users.
What I'm suggesting is a few hundred thousand instances, with millions of users, if not billions.
And I assume the instances would face a point where they need organization. So certain instances start hosting certain types of content.
So if you personally don't want to read on home and garden topics, you don't read those instances. That's what I'm suggesting. If you want to stick to your small corner of the fediverse, you do that.
What you're suggesting is that the fediverse never expand beyond the people you deem worthy of contributing content.
I tried to give peer-tube a chance. None of my youtube creators are producing content on peer-tube. I gave up when every single instance I found was just linux content.
With more celebrities bring more content. With more content brings more users. With more users brings more communities, and more niches.
I'm trying to bring down reddit, and instagram, and youtube, and twitter, and everything else thats considered social media. In its place, social media will default to the fediverse.
You on the other hand are trying to keep the fediverse from growing.
celebrities and their cult need to be culled. we don't want swiftys here lame losers listening to some 40 something year old singing about heartbreak. grow up
I think you have forums confused with microblogs.
@Lost_My_Mind let’s be honest, 99% of celebrities will use threads unless there’s a more popular and better designed activitypub alternative (spoiler: it wont happen for YEARS), so accounts will be centralized for 98% of people and the question about username is for now useless
No one should give a fuck if celebrities are here
It should work the same as email: you can trust it’s them if the user account is hosted on their own site, or their employer’s, or if they link to it from another confirmed source.
Kind of like the BBC has their own Mastodon server instead of being on someone elses.
Yep. Also, aren't there already celebrities on Mastodon? I know George Takei is. Granted, you'd have to know he was
@mastodon.socialversusmstdn.socialso that could complicate things for those unfamiliar with the platform.OP's definitely got a point, though.
One good thing IMO about threads federating, that we get the celebrities, we know they're verified, but I don't have to join corpo social media.
But look below in the comments. Can you even tell which of my comments came from Lemmy.World, and which comments didn't? Some platforms will just show Lost_My_Mind. I can't tell which platform @AbouBenAdhem is posting via. I just see AbouBenAdhem.
Use a better client that shows you the information? The default UI does, so that's firmly a problem you've inflicted on yourself.
I'm just using a web browser that came with my phone. And if they were all hidden, it wouldn't matter.
You'd just register your username. And this would be good for all the fediverse platforms. Once you register your innitial name, only you could register other services under that name. So it's always you. Even if you never register for a service, you registered the name.
Then, if you register a new service, even years later, you still have your name.
Who manages that centralized service? What prevents it from being bought out, or attacked?
Because it's not centralized. Every platform/instance just uses the same protocols. Any that try to go against that get defederated by all instances.
Yes.
I’m not familiar with every client, but on mine it only hides the domain for users on my own server. (Early email used to work exactly the same—you could send an email addressed to just a username with no tld and it would go to the user with that name on your own server by default.)
I'm not using any client. I'm just using the browser that came with my cell phone.
Yes. Yes we can.
I'm not here for celebrities and they will always flock to centralized platforms anyways, since they are all about the views.
I'm trying to change that.
Which is why if we make the fediverse normalized for celebrities to host content, they can get more views here.
I fully believe that this fediverse concept CAN be the future of the entire internet. Services that don't even exist yet can integrate with the fediverse, and it can scale easily by it's very nature. But there's a LOT of rough edges that keep the normies away....for now.
Right now, the fediverse is more than just decentralized. It's fractured.
Imagine posting an update on something, and it goes out to your mastodon, your Lemmy community, your pixelfed, and your peertube accounts. All at once. You wouldn't follow services, you'd follow people.
But we'd need all these services to integrate with each other nicely. And part of that would be making it so you don't have 7 different accounts for 7 different services. You have 1 account, and sign up for each service under that account.
All your notifications would go to the same place.
Your identity would be your username. People would know if it's your username, it's you.
But people here don't really care that much about celebrities being here and maybe not even their username being unique. Could probably be anon1, anon2, etc and it wouldn't matter that much, since real identity is probably not a draw for them. Focus on regular people wanting the userbase to want to use fediverse rather than celebrities which is an off-putting first impression and point of sale for lot of people here.
You need to pivot is what I'm saying to achieve what you want.
But you need to get the celebrities here first FOR the regular userbase to follow. Which is the whole point of the post.
It's like those dog memes about the stick. "No take! Only throw!" Well, you have to take the stick first, THEN you can throw the stick.
Well, you need the celebrities here first, THEN the regular userbase will come.
So how do you get them here? Well first you make a list of every problem that would prevent a celebrity from coming here. Then iron out those rough edges first.
I've already talked in other posts prior how the only way to grow the userbase is to be welcoming of people that you have no interest in interacting with. But it's fine. Because they don't want to interact with you either. It doesn't matter though because you can be on /c/Linuxmemes, and they can be on /c/homeandgarden.
And if Martha Stewart posted on /c/homeandgarden she'd bring her fanbase with her. And if Ozzy Osborn posted on /c/ozzybitesabat he'd bring his fanbase.
And so on and so on with each new celebrity. Some of them have overlap, some don't. But you're bringing more people, who create more instances, and then niche communities can develop. You get more people posting more content. And the platform grows with more varied topics than just politics, technology and video games.
Or you could ignore what the celebrities want, and google, and reddit, and instagram will always be the dominant platforms, while nobody will have ever heard of the fediverse.
I'm trying to bring the current system down.
"Celebrities" is quite a broad term.
I guess most people here were thinking about people they don't really share values with (let's say reality tv influencers for instance). On the other hand, if someone like Keanu Reeves for instance would do an AMA here, I'm pretty sure everyone would be happy and thankful for them to put some light on the Fediverse
That's why she hosts her own domain, instead of sending half a million followers to some random fediverse instance.
This solves the issues of having the same username across all platforms, assuming you host an instance for every platform you want to use. And also mske those domains private. But it doesn't address that same username being used on another instance/domain.
Like imagine someone had the usernsme Ada@someoffensivedomain.social and was impersonating you. If you made your living off your name, an imposter would affect your image.
If I was making my living off of my name, I wouldn't even know some random user with no followers from a troll domain exists.
Whatever the reason celebs don't take to the fediverse, this isn't it...
Tom@tomhanks.com
A celebrity can host their own domain to prove authenticity.
So what. On Xitter I can make an account called Tom.Hanks and get the blue mark by paying Elon. Because Tom Hanks has the username Tom_Hanks.
You're missing the point. You can have Tom.Hanks@twitter.com but you can't have Tom_Hanks@othertwitter.com
So when you come to the fediverse, instead of searching for Tom_Hanks@tomhanks.com, you just search for Tom_Hanks, and the fediverse will know that defaults to the account Tom_Hanks. Which is the same account on Lemmy, the same account on Peertube, the same account on pixelfed.
Because it's all Tom_Hanks.
Except Tom@TomHanks.com will come up first because they will surely have the most fooloerrs.
Typo, but kind of a cool word too. Like people who would fool around
Oh god it looks like I had a stroke at the end of that sentence ahhaha
We had a AMA with Will Ropp, an actor a few months ago: https://lemm.ee/post/31335226
!movies@lemm.ee
We verified it was him by having him send us a message from his IG.
How fun, this should go on a 'Best of the Fediverse' type post or something.
Who the fuck wants celebrities here?
This is a good thing.
We have @MargotRobbie@lemmy.world.
Don’t forget @jordanpeterson@lemmy.world
First time I hear about this account, I prefer Margot Robbie
I find its a pretty good parody account. I’ve I come to look forward to read about ridiculous lobster comparisons when stumbling upon one of their comments.
Damn, I just had a look at the comment above, that's something
Are you the OG Blaze? Did you move to feddit?
I am the OG Blaze, this account is listed on my other's bio: https://sopuli.xyz/u/Blaze
I keep a few accounts active at the same time to be able to have different feeds. This one is for meta discussions about the Fediverse, the sopuli one is for general interest, lemmy.zip for tech interest.
Kind of a workaround around the lack of multicommunities
Well, to begin with, let’s consider the lobster, which is a remarkable creature—remarkable not only for its physical structure but for what it represents in terms of hierarchical behavior, and in that regard, it becomes a fascinating lens through which we can understand something as intricate and contemporary as the cult of celebrity in modern society. Now, stay with me here because it may seem like a stretch at first, but I assure you the connection between these primordial crustaceans and the modern fixation on fame is anything but superficial. In fact, it cuts to the very heart of human nature and the evolutionary patterns that govern us.
Lobsters, as you may well know, have existed in their current form for over 350 million years. That’s older than the dinosaurs, older than trees, and certainly older than any social media platform or film studio. These creatures have survived through the ages, not by being passive, but by adapting, evolving, and competing within a well-established social hierarchy. They engage in fierce dominance battles, and from those battles, hierarchies are formed. The dominant lobster is more likely to mate, more likely to secure the best resources, and—this is key—more likely to succeed. Sound familiar?
Now, let’s leap from the seafloor to modern society. Humans, just like lobsters, are wired to respond to hierarchies. It’s not something we’ve constructed recently; it’s a fundamental part of our biology. We evolved within hierarchical structures, whether in small tribes or large civilizations. In many ways, we’re still those ancient, status-seeking creatures, but instead of fighting over resources at the bottom of the ocean, we’re jockeying for social recognition in our workplaces, our communities, and—here's where it gets interesting—within the celebrity culture.
Now, why is that? Why do we elevate certain people to celebrity status and obsess over them? It’s because we’ve evolved to look up to those who seem to represent success within our hierarchy. Celebrities, by virtue of their fame, wealth, or skill, appear to occupy the top rungs of the social ladder. They become, in a sense, the dominant lobsters in our cultural ocean. But here’s the problem: unlike lobsters, whose hierarchies are based on tangible outcomes—who can fight, who can mate, who can survive—our celebrity culture is often based on something far more superficial: visibility, not competence.
Think about it. In today’s world, you don’t have to be particularly skilled or intelligent to become a celebrity. You don’t even have to provide any real value to society. Often, it’s simply a matter of being seen, of being talked about, of being placed on a pedestal. And what does that do to us, as individuals and as a society? Well, it distorts our sense of what is truly valuable. We start to elevate people who, in many cases, are not worthy of that elevation, and we undermine the natural hierarchy that should be based on merit, on contribution, on real competence.
This is where the cult of celebrity becomes toxic. In a healthy society, we should aspire to be like those who have demonstrated genuine ability, resilience, and virtue—qualities that, in an evolutionary sense, help the tribe or the group survive and thrive. But when we fixate on fame for fame’s sake, we create a kind of feedback loop of superficiality. We idolize people who, in many cases, are more fragile than the structures they’ve been elevated to. They become the hollow shells of dominant lobsters—creatures who have risen to the top not by strength, not by merit, but by the capricious winds of public attention.
This has real consequences. Young people, for example, grow up in a world where they’re bombarded with images of these so-called “dominant” figures. They’re told, implicitly, that the path to success is not through hard work, not through building something meaningful, but through the accumulation of attention. And that’s corrosive. It erodes our individual sense of purpose. It pulls us away from the things that actually matter: our relationships, our communities, our personal development.
Now, consider the lobster once again. In the natural world, when a lobster loses a fight and drops in the hierarchy, it doesn’t spiral into depression because it lost its Twitter followers. It doesn’t collapse under the weight of shame because it was de-platformed from some ephemeral stage. No, it resets its serotonin levels, re-calibrates its sense of place, and starts anew. But what happens to us when we buy into the cult of celebrity and we inevitably fail to live up to those impossible standards? We become disillusioned, resentful, and anxious because we’re measuring our self-worth against a false and fleeting ideal.
In a way, the cult of celebrity is a distorted reflection of the natural hierarchy that we’ve evolved within for millions of years. But instead of basing our hierarchy on real competence, on the ability to solve problems and contribute meaningfully, we’ve allowed it to be hijacked by the shallow pursuit of fame. And this is dangerous because it not only distorts our individual sense of self-worth but also undermines the values that should guide society as a whole. It’s as if we’ve allowed ourselves to worship false gods, gods made not of substance but of glitter and distraction.
So, what do we do about this? Well, the first thing is to clean up our own lives. Just as the lobster recalibrates itself after a defeat, we too must recalibrate our sense of value and purpose. We need to recognize that real success is not measured in likes or followers but in the tangible impact we have on the world around us. And we need to be very cautious about whom we elevate to positions of prominence in our culture because when we elevate the wrong people, we’re not just distorting our own lives; we’re distorting the entire structure of society.
In conclusion, the cult of celebrity is a toxic inversion of the natural, competence-based hierarchies that have guided us for millions of years, just as lobsters have thrived through their dominance hierarchies. If we are to resist this toxicity, we must first recognize it for what it is: a distraction from the things that truly matter. And then, we must do the difficult work of re-centering our values, of finding meaning in real accomplishments, and of ascending the hierarchy—not through fame or notoriety, but through competence, courage, and responsibility.
Because with celebrities come fanbases.
Imagine if whoever the new hot artist is put out their next music video exclusively on Peer-Tube.
Suddenly millions of people would be using peer-tube. Then they'd ask "what is the fediverse?"
If you want to keep the fediverse small and isolated, go stay on hexbear, or whatever that one isolated instance is.
I would rather every single human be using the fediverse.
Yeah I don't want those type of people here.
You don't want the fediverse to grow?
It is, it is natural organic growth.
Organic growth is much more manageable and predictable than explosive cancerous growth.
Not like that. I'd rather the FV just slowly accumulate internet weirdos, OSS nerds, etc., than triple in size overnight because some pop singer told their fans to join
Not a la Eternal September
Reminds me of ICANN fucking up all the domain names.
CocaCola.com CocaCola.new CocaCola.drink Cocacola.world CocaCola.bev
Etc.
Shameful. One thing that might work for the fediverse is federal institutions running their own Mastadon instances on .gov to move away from announcements on Twitter. You can’t fake .gov domains.
@reddig33 you can actually (specially in france) but the point isn’t there
I think it might be kind of nice to be Tom Hanks and have the name WilsonsOnlyFriend@lemmy.world and just chat and chill.
Shock: I'm not really Artie Shaw.
I don't know who Artie Show is. You could have told me you were Artie Shaw, and I'd have not questioned it. I'd have just thought that was your name.
I didn't really expect anyone to know that, which was sort of the joke. He was very famous in his time, but by now it's a bit of a deep cut.
Artie Shaw was a clarinetist who ran a jazz band. In addition to that, he was also quite the weirdo. Womanizer, liked math a lot (like more than is natural), was an expert marksman who was nationally ranked in that sort of thing, and really into fly fishing. Also, currently, very dead. And that's good because otherwise he'd be 114.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artie_Shaw
here's a sample of his work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_v3GY3ZqdM
That's always the case, even for centralized platforms. Usernames are just usernames. Same thing with email. This is a fundamental problem with the internet and the solution is that celebrities and such host their own ActivityPub server (just like their own email server) or make it clear on their personal website what their own official account is somewhere else.
I have a dream that one day I be part of a platform where one will not be judged by the glamor of their username but by the quality of their discourse.
Truthiness of a user should be determined with corroboration on 3rd party services.
Except no one will. If millions of people were on the fediverse, maybe 1% would confirm.
We live in a world where people read the headline and believe it, but don't even open the article.
Then it doesn't matter.
But it would.
Imagine Kamala Harris as president had a mastodon account. And somebody else made a duplicate Kamala Harris account. And this duplicate announced that the United States has gone to war with Russia.
Except these media stations don't know how the fediverse works. They don't know what an instance is. They just see Kamala Harris on social media announcing war.
And in media you HAVE to be the first to break the news story. So now you have every major news outlet confirming nuclear war, and the nation is panicing.
Meanwhile, Harris is trying to figure out how this all started. And this whole thing maybe lasts 10-60 minutes before somebody notices the mistake. Then it takes time to correct themselves and calm everybody down.
All over something that isn't happening. All because people don't check sources.
Now this is an extreme example, but I could see it happening if the fediverse was bigger, under it's current setup.
Or, all accounts in the fedi are anonymous by nature, and if they need to be verified, they are verified on 3rd party sources.
Except they won't.
Give em a blue checkmark
$50 bucks little man, put that shit in my hand.
Taylor Swift's Twitter handle is @taylorswift13 and it doesn't seem to be a problem for her.
Because there can only be one taylorswift13.
There aren't multiple instances on twitter.
My point is there could be a @taylorswift but it doesn’t matter because people know which account is hers.
Even without federation and such it's an issue. Old twitter actually did a really good job of this, but other social networks have had problems in the past,
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/katie-hopkins-impersonated-parler/
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/02/republicans-parler-trolls-347737
We don't have to guess if trolls will try to impersonate celebs and be successful at it, because it's already happened elsewhere.
That said, there are two nice things about the fediverse. First, verification is explicitly not offered, so folks have to do the digging themselves to see if an account is official or not. (Which is as easy as checking a person's web site). Or perhaps confusing a regular person's account with a celeb of the same name.
Second, you can host your own instance. Celebs might not bother, but official gov't agencies set up their own domains and websites - and in particular under domains like .gov which aren't open to regular folks. So seeing if a gov't agency is really authentic is potentially as simple as checking the domain that the instance is using.
I mean sure......but essentially you're using the facts as they stand as justification that it will never work, when my whole point is that these facts as they stand need to change because they will never work unless we change them.
People keep using email, and domains as reasons for why it's not an issue, but there's a reason celebrities aren't known for their email. You can tweet at celebrities, and you can follow celebrities on instagram, and all the other services, but you generally can't email them.
Now, the reason for this is that celebrity wants to own the exact spelling and exact letter/number combination that they're known for. I like to try to make things relatable to the person that I'm talking to, but let's face it, abff08f4813c is a really really bad username for branding purposes. But, be that as it may, IF you were a celebrity, and everybody knew abff08f4813c on instagram, and everybody knew abff08f4813c on twitter, then if you were to come to the fediverse, you wouldn't want a second abff08f4813c to exist. You would want to own "abff08f4813c" on every platform, even if you're not on that platform. Even if you don't use tiktok, you would want to make sure nobody else has the name abff08f4813c on tiktok.
The problem is, the fediverse is so fractured that's not really logistically possible. Because if you try to sue one person on one other instance that has abff08f4813c, now suddenly 300 more abff08f4813c on 300 different instances all pop up.
What I'm suggesting is, no matter which instance you're on, if you search abff08f4813c, the search should find that username, and direct you to the profile that corrilates with you. And even though that profile is only on one instance, it would make it so if I tried to make abff08f4813c, on another instance, I would be told that username is already taken.
From there, you could absolutely create an old twitter style verification system. And NOW celebrities will be more willing to use the fediverse. But until that changes, I don't see any celebrity who values their own brand on an international scale, be willing to publically announce they are on the fediverse, and their fans can migrate to the fediverse to follow them.
More or less.
I think to make that argument you'd have to first argue that this works elsewhere. But we see warnings like this, https://web.archive.org/web/20221104001618/https://old.reddit.com/r/TaylorSwift/comments/yljj15/swifties_be_warned_that_this_is_a_fake_account/ or like this, https://www.instagram.com/czaronline/p/CvAts_9MFDf/
then I'm not at all convinced that this is the case.
Perhaps it's a generational thing? Back in the day you could. Bill Gates used to be reachable at bill.gates@microsoft.com and Jeff Bozos at jeff@amazon.com
On the flip side, just because a celebrity has a handle on a particular social media service doesn't guarantee you can reach them. Taylor Swift has a tumblr but she hasn't publicly used it in years.
What's the reason? Two things come to my mind: first, Bill Gates supposedly said he had an entire team whose job was just to read and respond to his public email.
Second, email is direct contact, like a DM rather than a tweet (that everyone sees). The email equivalent would be a mailing list. If you want that, you can join Taylor Swift's mailing list over at https://www.taylorswift.com/#mailing-list
I wouldn't mind that much, tbh. Though considering the username in question, it's very unlikely.
Much harder with a name like Taylor Swift. How many other people have the same name? Even on twitter there's a different taylorswift - so the famous singer is taylorswift13 there.
My username is probably the wrong one to use for this example.
But more generally - does anyone want to be taylorswift@hotmail.com and taylorswift@gmail.com and taylorswift@outlook.com and taylorswift@yahoo.com all at once? (Well, okay, yes there probably is someone who wants that, with bad intentions, but practically speaking it's kinda obvious that these aren't all official email accounts by the singer.)
But Taylor Swift may not be able to sue the other person - she's not the only one named Taylor Swift after all.
And then someone tries to be abffo8f4813c or abff08f48i3c.
uh ... https://joinfediverse.wiki/Notable_Fediverse_accounts
I mean, there's no accounting for the fans, sure. If anything, celebs seek out platforms that have lots of people to connect them with fans, rather than them bring fans to a platform, I'd guess.
Sure, but it's not a required step.
Mastodon.social could implement a mimic of the old twitter style verification system for folks who join that particular instance - and those joining another instance simply wouldn't have the guarantee.
And then threads can implement the verification system for folks joining directly through threads - and again those joined on another instance simply wouldn't have the guarantee.
And then Bluesky can ...
I don't really see anyone but a commercial company even trying to do this - it'd be a headache - and probably expensive - in terms of the requirements to protect the data used (such as identify card verification).
But I'd add - if someone could draft this up and show me a working prototype, I might be easier to convince. It's a lot easier to think about something when you can play with an idea.
There is also only 1 taylorswift@lemmy.world
Why would there being extra numbers or a different instace change anything?
We decided to not host any sort of Buy-Sell-Trade community on our hobby instance for this reason. It's a small community so a lot of people know usernames of people they know and can trust. It's very easy for a scammer to use someone's username and say "I'll sell you that thing! Send me $150!".
I'm on MBin. Your username is displayed as: walden. I can mouse over that to learn that your *full* username is \@walden\@sub.wetshaving.social.
This is the same thing as email domain names and display names. Yes, scammers still exploit *that,* too, but for the most part, people have gotten used to also looking at the actual full email address, and not just the display name or mailbox name. The same can happen here.
Still, I would much prefer if the default view here showed the full username and not just the display name.
There is an issue on the Mbin repo asking for that as an option if you are or know a developer with free time
Those poor celebrities! What will we do without them?
I see this as a benefit. Generally speaking celebrity posts are the most useless threads on most platforms.
Discord and email worked for a long time with needing something extra after the name. Why would the fediverse be different?
You seem to be under the impression that it’s good if this place grows explosively. It’s not. There’s no VC to pay back here (and thank fuckin god for that). There’s no ad revenue here (again, this is good).
Also, not entirely sure what exactly to make of the weirdly targeted quip about a Chinese child, but spidey sense says it’s nothing good.
Not sure what VC stands for.....
But the Chinese boy with the broken leg is my 103 year old grandmother in a wheelchair. But he's not actually Taylor Swift, which is the point of the comparison.
VC = venture capitalism.
The narwal bacons at midnight?
Please no
please seek help
What's stopping that same 7 year old taking TomHanks@Lemmy.World before the real Tom Hanks even knows about Lemmy?
It's not the lack of unique usernames that's a problem. It's the lack of identity verification. Which, I mean, understandably is lacking because it's not like there are high profile people making accounts here. Well, except of course for Margot Robbie.
If "TomHanks" is his username on every other service, like twitter, and youtube, and tiktok, and instagram, then he would want to use it when he comes to the fediverse. Now, if only ONE person can have the username TomHanks (and it just so happens to be @Lemmy.World), then he could send a cease and disist letter, and if that doesn't work, a lawsuit. Madonna did it in the 90s with Madonna.com.
However, if TomHanks@Lemmy.World can exist, and TomHanks@Lemm.ee can exist, and TomHanks@piefed.social can exist and.....and.....and.....then it gets a little impossible for him to really own that username, because it can be duplicated on an infinate amount of instances, some that may not even exist when he shows up to the fediverse.
But if only one instance can have TomHanks, than he could absolutely show courts he's had a vested interest and usership of that identity and thus that's HIS username. Even on services he's never signed up for. Like if he doesn't have an instagram account at all, but someone else starts using TomHanks on instagram, he can take it to the courts that they are not allowed to do that, because that's his username.
But the way the fediverse is currently set up right now, that's not feasible. Because he could enter a court battle with TomHanks@Lemm.ee, and then 5 more instances with his username popup. And eventually it becomes harder and harder to prove that people know his ownership of that username if there's 500 other people also using the same username. It's the reason you can't email celebrities. They can't control their presence in email, so they don't use that as their identity.
The account with her pic floating around here is real?
Respect
Case in point.
I honestly hope they never adopt the fediverse. Imagine wanting that.
Ah, yes, that's a very good point. You're the smartest man in the world!
Either way, celebrities will probably never use Lemmy or other social media unless it goes mainstream.
Photoshop exists.
Don't be silly. Tom Hanks have no idea how to use Photoshop...
Yeah, thats the goal. To make the fediverse (and Lemmy by assosiation) mainstream.
This would require some kind of federation alliance of instances that check each other's usernames to ensure no duplicates over the whole network. Sure, maybe lemmy.shit doesn't recognize the network, but then they don't get federated with.
This is definitely possible, but it doesn't seem to be happening.
Oh I've been thinking it needs an official alliance now for some time. Where a preagreed set of protocols are all adheard to. Just so all the services can play nicely with each other. Still decentralized in operation, but unified in experience.
And if some rouge instance wants to stay seperate, well, good luck growing hexbear.
Good