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.

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    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.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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      3 months ago

      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.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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      3 months ago

      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.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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      3 months ago

      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.

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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          3 months ago

          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.

            • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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              3 months ago

              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.

              • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.org
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                3 months ago

                Any that try to go against that

                How do you identify them? Lemm.ee registers Tom Hanks, does every other instance have to check what information they provided to trust them?

                What prevents someone to bribe a small instance to register a celebrity username on their instance?

                • If anything we want to encourage this.

                  I like the example of SAG AFTRA hosting their own instance to be official, for example. Celebs typically have their own domains and websites, so easy enough to hire a team to create and manage their own instance that supports the celeb but federates. And you know it’s legit just because it’s on the celeb’s own domain. Ditto for gov’t agencies having their own instances.

      • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        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.)