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.

  • WatDabney@sopuli.xyz
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    7 days ago

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

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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      7 days 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.

      • Mathieu :mastodon:@h4.io
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        6 days ago

        @Lost_My_Mind let’s be honest, 99% of celebrities will use threads unless there’s a more popular and better designed activitypub alternative (spoiler: it wont happen for YEARS), so accounts will be centralized for 98% of people and the question about username is for now useless

      • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
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        7 days 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
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          7 days 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.

          • Darth_Mew@lemmy.world
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            6 days 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

          • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
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            7 days 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
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              7 days 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.

              • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business
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                7 days ago

                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.)

                • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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                  7 days ago

                  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.

              • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
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                7 days 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
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                  7 days 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.

            • rglullis@communick.news
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              6 days ago

              Quantity is quality, if you have good filters in place.

              I never understood people that argue something is bad by looking at the median case. The problem of Reddit, Twitter and Facebook is not due to the amount of people they have, and they were absolutely fine until they tried to exploit their userbases.

              (Aside for @blaze@feddit.org: see what I mean about Fedi’s anti-growth and reactionary culture? Our friend here is not an isolated case)

              • Blaze@feddit.org
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                6 days ago

                Aside for @blaze@feddit.org: see what I mean about Fedi’s anti-growth and reactionary culture? Our friend here is not an isolated case

                It’s more against having celebrities and their followers coming here en masse, which I get.

                I’ve still seen a few comments mentioning “organic grow” which seems indeed healthier

                • rglullis@communick.news
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                  6 days ago

                  “oh, I want it to grow, I just don’t it want to grow with people that I don’t like”

                  You can dress it however you want, it’s still elitist, reactionary and exclusive.

  • vamp07@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

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

  • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org
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    7 days 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.

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    6 days 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.

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    1 day ago

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

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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    7 days 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.

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      7 days 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.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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      7 days 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
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        7 days 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.)

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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          7 days 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.

          • Blaze@feddit.org
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            6 days ago

            Who manages that centralized service? What prevents it from being bought out, or attacked?

            • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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              6 days 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@feddit.org
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                6 days 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.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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      7 days 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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      7 days ago

      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.

      • ArtieShaw@fedia.io
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        6 days ago

        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

  • reddig33@lemmy.world
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    7 days 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.