idle technology thought:

The "@" symbol as used in email has a sort of poetry to it. It describes a person at a place. It symbolically embeds an understanding of the structure of the network.

Twitter's abuse of the @ symbol to address a *person* is the protocol design of a linguistic drift that results in semantic inversion, like the unfortunately popular "I could care less".

In a better world the fediverse would've retreated to custom-scheme URIs rather than double-@ addressing.

@glyph back when Twitter staked out @whoever and Google claimed +whoever I half expected Github to claim ~whoever.

@glyph different counterpoint: "at" means multiple things, and works in both "this message is directed at this person" and "this person is at this place"

@glyph My memory is fuzzy but I thought it was a user-originated convention that they later officially adopted (like the hashtag).

@eevee @glyph also, "don't at me" is just a great idiom XD

@eevee fair enough, it's possible that I've over-indexed on saying "To" (so and so) for 20 years in emails before "at" came on the scene for this purpose

@eevee @glyph [argumentative voice] clearly the fediverse should use UUCP notation

@glyph "to" is how you describe a polite letter. "at" is how you describe lobbing a thing in someone's general direction

@eevee perhaps the naming was far more on the nose than I was giving it credit for

@ubernostrum @glyph It was also totally a thing in web forums before Twitter. Like if you wrote an answer to multiple people, you put it before the paragraph. Which linguistically somewhat made sense too.