Celebrities will never adopt the Fediverse until usernames are centralized.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Who the fuck wants celebrities here?

This is a good thing.

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 ?

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.

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.

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

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

Those poor celebrities! What will we do without them?

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.

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.

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

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

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

Shock: I'm not really Artie Shaw.

Case in point.

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.

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

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

Give em a blue checkmark

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.