this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024

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Celebrities will never adopt the Fediverse until usernames are centralized. (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

150 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Because let's say you're Tom Hanks. And you get [email protected]

Well, what's stopping someone else from adopting [email protected]?

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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Good

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

I think it might be kind of nice to be Tom Hanks and have the name [email protected] and just chat and chill.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

Those poor celebrities! What will we do without them?

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 month ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's why she hosts her own domain, instead of sending half a million followers to some random fediverse instance.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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 [email protected] and was impersonating you. If you made your living off your name, an imposter would affect your image.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Taylor Swift's Twitter handle is @taylorswift13 and it doesn't seem to be a problem for her.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Because there can only be one taylorswift13.

There aren't multiple instances on twitter.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

My point is there could be a @taylorswift but it doesn’t matter because people know which account is hers.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (4 children)

I'm not here for celebrities and they will always flock to centralized platforms anyways, since they are all about the views.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Truthiness of a user should be determined with corroboration on 3rd party services.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Then it doesn't matter.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Or, all accounts in the fedi are anonymous by nature, and if they need to be verified, they are verified on 3rd party sources.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Except they won't.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Then return to the first clause.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't think it's a huge deal, we'll either know they're legit or not. Care to weigh in @[email protected] ?

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 month ago

Well, what’s stopping someone else from adopting [email protected]?

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I honestly hope they never adopt the fediverse. Imagine wanting that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Give em a blue checkmark

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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!".

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm on MBin. Your username is displayed as: walden. I can mouse over that to learn that your full username is @[email protected].

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.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I presume I'm supposed to care, but I dont, and I don't know why anyone would.

[+] [email protected] -8 points 1 month ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

No one should give a fuck if celebrities are here

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (7 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (16 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

You're right. I see no more intrinsic value in having 1mil users, versus 15k. And nothing you can say is likely to convince me that quantity determines or makes for a valuable platform. We've seen the growth mentality and resulting corporate greed destroy numerous platforms already.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Except in this case, there can be no corporate green to destroy the fediverse. They can build and destroy their own instance, and their own communities....but the very nature of the fediverse is that it scales well, and it CAN'T be owned. So growth can only help. Temporarily it may crash the servers with more traffic than it can handle, but more instances and servers will be added, and the userbase will spread out.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

None of my youtube creators are producing content on peer-tube.

That's probably more of a monetization issue than anything related to peertube. If your job is making Youtube videos, then at least some portion of your income is AdSense. Sure, it's not what it was, but at scale it's not nothing, and the peertube alternative is.... $0.

(Also, for the non-commercial ones or the ones that are funded outside of Youtube, maybe ask if they'll use Peertube. I've had luck with a couple of people I watched being willing to upload to multiple platforms, but you don't know if you don't ask.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I can't ask, because years ago I watched a video on twitter. It was funny. I tweeted "That killed me".

I was banned for inciting death threats by an automod.

They've never heard of mastodon.

And unless I just have no idea where it is, youtube doesn't seem to have a direct messaging system. Everything these days is twitter.

So I'm trying to change that.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

I think you have forums confused with microblogs.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (11 children)

Who the fuck wants celebrities here?

This is a good thing.

[+] [email protected] -8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah I don't want those type of people here.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 month ago (3 children)

You don't want the fediverse to grow?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

It is, it is natural organic growth.

Organic growth is much more manageable and predictable than explosive cancerous growth.

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