4mo ago

Celebrities will never adopt the Fediverse until usernames are centralized.

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.

151 comments

Well, what’s stopping someone else from adopting TomHanks@Lemm.ee?
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.

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.
  
  I think you have forums confused with microblogs.
  
  No one should give a fuck if celebrities are here

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.

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?

That's a feature, not a bug. Celebrity culture needs to get in the sea.

Who the fuck wants celebrities here?
This is a good thing.
- We have @MargotRobbie@lemmy.world.
  
  Don’t forget @jordanpeterson@lemmy.world
- 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.

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.social versus mstdn.social so 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.
  
  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.)
  
  Can you even tell which of my comments came from Lemmy.World, and which comments didn't?
  Yes. Yes we can.

Celebrities are going to be shocked when they hear about email

Yes, but you see. Lemmy users generally don't give a flat fuck about what celebrities want.

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 ?
- 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.
- Didn't she just have a baby?

Never heard of email

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.actor domain and set up the @me@tomhanks.actor AP 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.

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 seek help

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...

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.

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.

Those poor celebrities! What will we do without them?

Account verification is relatively simple, if you have your own website you just add a link back with a special formatting. Problem is, barely anyone applies for self-verification, and several platforms such as Lemmy don't support self-verification whatsoever. I can see why something like a distributed verification agency should be a thing, if we manage to make the implementation less technical for the end users of course.

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.
  
  There is also only 1 taylorswift@lemmy.world
  Why would there being extra numbers or a different instace change anything?
  
  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 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

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.

I see this as a benefit. Generally speaking celebrity posts are the most useless threads on most platforms.

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 waldensub.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

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.

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.

Case in point.

Discord and email worked for a long time with needing something extra after the name. Why would the fediverse be different?

Give em a blue checkmark
- $50 bucks little man, put that shit in my hand.

Ah, yes, that's a very good point. You're the smartest man in the world!

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

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.
  
  so what if someone that is named Tom Hanks, there can be more than 1 person with a name, that isn't the pedophile celeb tom Hanks? are they not allowed to have their real name? this is stupid and no one gives a shit what celebs say think or do. except maybe you?
- The account with her pic floating around here is real?
  Respect

Good

Take picture of proof you are Tom Hanks
post picture on Lemmy
Pin it to the top on your profile (once that feature exist)
???
profit!
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.

151 comments