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.
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?
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.
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.
Because anyone can grab the same name, on a different platform.
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 think it might be kind of nice to be Tom Hanks and have the name WilsonsOnlyFriend@lemmy.world and just chat and chill.
Your family is 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?
Pssh. Celebrities on social media, who needs them anyway.
Like, say, if esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie was on social media, it’d be utterly brilliant to choose to be on Lemmy, as no-one would believe it even if she went by her real name.
Personally I would find that highly amusing, a testament to having the soul of a true thespian.
Never heard of email
Discord and email worked for a long time with needing something extra after the name. Why would the fediverse be different?
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.
I’m not here for celebrities and they will always flock to centralized platforms anyways, since they are all about the views.
they will always flock to centralized platforms anyways,
I’m trying to change that.
since they are all about the views.
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
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.
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.
I mean sure…but essentially you’re using the facts as they stand as justification that it will never work
More or less.
when my whole point is that these facts as they stand need to change because they will never work unless we change them.
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.
You can tweet at celebrities, and you can follow celebrities on instagram, and all the other services, but you generally can’t email them.
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.
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.
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
you wouldn’t want a second abff08f4813c to exist.
I wouldn’t mind that much, tbh. Though considering the username in question, it’s very unlikely.
Even if you don’t use tiktok, you would want to make sure nobody else has the name abff08f4813c on tiktok.
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.
now suddenly 300 more abff08f4813c on 300 different instances all pop up.
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.)
Because if you try to sue one person on one other instance that has abff08f4813c,
But Taylor Swift may not be able to sue the other person - she’s not the only one named Taylor Swift after all.
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.
And then someone tries to be abffo8f4813c or abff08f48i3c.
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,
uh … https://joinfediverse.wiki/Notable_Fediverse_accounts
and their fans can migrate to the fediverse to follow them.
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.
From there, you could absolutely create an old twitter style verification system.
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).
My point is there could be a @taylorswift but it doesn’t matter because people know which account is hers.
@pruwybn same for drakes instagram (champagnepapi)
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
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.
I honestly hope they never adopt the fediverse. Imagine wanting that.
Good
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
