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.

  • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    37
    ·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        21
        ·
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        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.

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          2 months ago

          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.

          • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            9
            ·
            edit-2
            2 months ago

            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.

            • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              2 months ago

              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.

              • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                4
                ·
                edit-2
                2 months ago

                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.

                • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  ·
                  2 months 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.

          • Darth_Mew@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            2 months ago

            celebrities and their cult need to be culled. we don’t want swiftys here lame losers listening to some 40 something year old singing about heartbreak. grow up

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    2 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.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      2 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
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      2 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.

      • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        2 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.)

  • reddig33@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • vamp07@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    2 months ago

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

  • Today@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    2 months ago

    I think it might be kind of nice to be Tom Hanks and have the name WilsonsOnlyFriend@lemmy.world and just chat and chill.

  • walden@sub.wetshaving.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    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!”.

  • HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • GBU_28@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    2 months ago

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

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      2 months ago

      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.

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          2 months ago

          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.

          • GBU_28@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            edit-2
            2 months ago

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

                • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  2 months ago

                  Then people won’t sign up for it.

                  The fediverse as it stands right now is confusing enough as it is for new people. Now you’re saying you want to add in the chaos that comes from everybody being annonomous? They say that the internet, and trolling, and threats of violence are encouraged online because you’re annonomous. And now you want to highlight that feature on a service thats hard enough to grasp without nazis and death threats.