People still fretting about "owning" their username on every instance.
<morpheus>What if I told you that you never owned your username on the birdsite in the first place?</morpheus>
@lmorchard this. Plus, perhaps they could be acquainted with a certain weird communication medium where they also do not "own" their usernames across all servers...
...e-mail.
@rysiek @lmorchard Or, ya know, real life.
@lmorchard @lou1306 not a fan of fedora. too beta for me.
Oh, you mean the hat.
I can tell you with pretty good certainty that I own this username - at least, insofar as I have registered this domain name and I run this server. Like, my name shows up in there twice, so you know it's legit.
@lmorchard ah yes, security through repetition
@lmorchard i dunno, you should probably sign each toot
Kindest regards,
Les Orchard
just so people will be really, really sure
@lmorchard People should never trust this identity to be me. Then again, they should probably give me the side eye in real life too.
@jrconlin I know for a fact that you are a cylon
@lmorchard The preferred term is "Toaster American"
@charafan asterisk*
@lmorchard Is that a thing? Do these people have email addresses with _every_ provider out there?
@lmorchard do these people also want to claim "their" email address on every email server? o.O
@T045T MY ~BRAND~!
@lmorchard still possible... just sign up to each of the 401 available instances with the same username and keep tabs on upcoming instances (and better hurry before I steal your username)
@lmorchard I think there is a valid criticism here that mastodon needs better UI/UX for identifying whether someone is is who you think they are.
@thelsdj @lmorchard Based on the saga of my wife and her namesake in the UK (who thinks [REDACTED]@gmail is _her_ email address) I'm pretty well convinced this is a Hard Problem in human psychology and we're going to be grappling with it forever.
... Not shortening people's handles, ever, might educate but would probably also suck UX-wise. Allowing assignment of petnames might also help. That's all I got.
@lmorchard How do they even handle multiples of a username? Still not totally understanding the distributed model.
@Jesse The first part (what most people think of as username) is unique per site, but no restrictions between sites.
Your "username" is not "Jesse" - it's Jesse@mastodon.zaclys.com and that's unique across the web
@lmorchard Ah, gotcha. Thanks!
@lmorchard *mindblown*