It’s time to demote Twitter usernames as the canonical @-names online. @davextreme (on both Micro.blog, where we’ve been discussing this issue, and Twitter, where you might be reading this) has some good thoughts in this direction.

@dancohen @davextreme This gets at what bugs me about Mastodon. You can follow across federated instances, but you have to create a new handle at each one. It should be like email where you can choose whether to create a new handle or re-use the same one as you please.

@dancohen I wish there comes a day when I could just @-someone and that would refer their site’s /about page. And send a webmention to them that they have been mentioned. @- should point to be a user and the user should decide where he wants to follow that.

A great discussion. And thanks for sharing the link @davextreme

@amit The root problem, which I maybe should have stated explicitly in the post, is the question of what link equals a person on the Web. Do I want to link to your Twitter specifically, or you (whatever that means)?

@davextreme My hope is it will one day be you. You get to know that someone mentioned you not on Twitter or Facebook or even Micro.blog, but at a place you control (wish is that to be your site, webmentions can achieve that).

@davextreme It feels like it’s time for me to dust off my anti-@-name-reference thoughts and turn them into a post ;-) (tl;dr, roughly: @-names are designed for machines, not humans, and using them all over the place, especially where they are not needed, is dehumanizing.)

I’m with @amit; the canonical link for a person (in their role as an individual, and perhaps in certain, but not all, professional capacities) should be their homepage (or blog, in the event they have both and they are not integrated and the former is moribund while the latter is active), with a further series of fallbacks to service profiles as necessary. (We need a universal LDAP or…was it Finger? to help :-P )

I’d also argue that unless you specifically want to notify someone on a service, you should not use their @-name at all in your text and just use their actual name in the appropriate form and link it appropriately for the context, if a link is necessary in that context (e.g., “Manton Reece has done a great job with Micro.blog” in an article on my blog, but perhaps only “Manton has done a great job with Micro.blog” in a reply here)—as you note, though, this falls down on glorified-plain-text-rendered-in-HTML services like Facebook and Twitter, since you can’t link. I’m not sure how to de-overload (@-)mentions in those limited platforms, but everywhere else—and particularly on blogs and other truee web content—all we need is for people to start doing the appropriate thing ;-)

For your UI example, I’d go a step further; since ideally we’re not using @-names in the text content at all, show an empty text field “Notify the following user(s) about this post:” where you type the @-names of users you want to notify (maybe it will suggest, once you focus the field, @-names based on Name-@-name mappings), which has the added benefit of adding another level of intentionality to notifications. Make the post author choose if and who to notifty, rather than having the software ask whether not to notify everyone.

I’ll also note that when Icro (IIRC) came out, Manton noted that he liked the way that app emphasized the person’s name and de-emphasized the @-name in its UI, and he mentioned he’d like to move Micro.blog in that direction. Also, there are several people here who do “@-name Name foo…” (or even “Name, foo… @-name”) when they’re replying to someone, which I really like, although I’ve had difficulty adpoting it (and character limits are…limiting in this case, too).

Sorry, Dave and Amit, that reply got away from me ;-)

@smokey I think I agree with your @ naming. 😃

I’ll try to do better from now on. 😉

@smokey Good thoughts. I agree re: just using a person’s name, hyperlinked, and it removes the “do I ping?” problem. Identity is complicated, fragmented, and transitory. I’ve written more on this but I want the post to sit at least overnight. More soon.

@davextreme @smokey @amit This is a good conversation. I would love it if everyone had a domain and we could use, say, for me, dancohen.org as the canonical reference. But one (realistic? pragmatic? depressive?) concern for me has been for regular people who might never have a personal domain and see their presence on a particular service as their canonical online home.

@dancohen I realize ICQ tried this and failed, authority control would be even more complex than usual, shifting a government is essentially impossible, and I realize this idea is absurd, but:

We already all have a government-issued private ID number. A solution might be a universal public ID number that people can connect to whatever services they like, which acts as a sort of central operator for communication and authority control. My twitter, facebook, email, etc. are all connected to this number, and either I or some central system is responsible for routing messages from one point of contact to each other point of contact through this central number.

@scott\_bot @dancohen Actually we already have such a number - a phone number. The issue is it's not owned by an individual, but a phone is already a handy tool that can do the routing for us.

@scott\_bot Yay! You're here on M.b! Yes, that's something of a possibility, I guess…haven't there been centralized ID services like this before, that catalog all the services you're on? I seem to recall them (and their failure…).

@dancohen Your last message convinced me =]. Sure, but that's where this conversation is already leaning. Not only that, there have been open protocol like jabber/XMPP (not to mention plain ol' RSS) which ultimately failed, but sometimes we can learn from stuff that have failed and make them succeed. I suspect a government-issued ID service, or even something centered around a phone number, would at least be slightly easier than a domain for every person.

@scott\_bot So glad you're here and that I don't have to go back to that other service for this discussion. ;) I worry that the gov ID thing will raise other concerns (privacy, control, etc.), but I also worry that there's no way that everyone will sign up for a domain, so maybe there's something to a passive ID acquisition such as that.

@dancohen I mean, it's not like we don't have a slew of government IDs already, but now I'm warming to the idea of a phone number, which isn't a perfect solution for a number of reasons, but it's an existing one, which is even better than perfect.

@scott\_bot Linking to government issued IDs is a bad idea for a whole slew of reasons. Never mind the fact that you’re limiting yourself to one or handful of countries. Phone numbers are slightly better, but it’s the same. Not everyone has a phone number, there are loads of people without one that are still active on internet (library computers, etc).

@oyam Yeah I don't think it's a good solution, just a slightly better solution than using a domain.

@smokey I agree with most of that, especially using names as opposed to @ on blogs/text. I don’t find @-names dehumanizing though, I always thought of them as nicknames.

The canonical link for a person [...] should be their homepage [...], with a further series of fallbacks to service profiles as necessary. [...]

But do we need this? Every platform already asks each user for a website, and has some sort of profile page. On M.b I’m @oyam and want my site to be oyam.ca. If I don’t provide a site, it’s my profile on the platform. On another platform that can be completely different, but as a user it’s my choice what site I want to direct people to (and want to represent me in that community). There is also no rule for listing my profile URL from one platform as my site on another platform, if I wish to centralize.

@scott\_bot You can take one more step from numbers/domains and arrive at email, which are unique and generally more accessible to people. (Emails are better than domains too, because they are individual. A domain can represent a whole family) but then you’re starting to get into the OpenID territory.

@scott\_bot the biggest problem with a phone number as the central identifier is... Well, it's your phone number. I get enough spam and robo-calls now, I don't want to make it even more public and link it even more to me. Not to mention the dangers of harrasment and such. I see the reasoning, and pretty mcuh everyone has one, but I don't think in the end using phone numbers as any kind of public identifier is a good way to go.

@DrOct I'm not actually suggesting using phone number as the ID for point-of-contact (unless you want to), just as the semi-public (as in, you don't care if it's leaked, as you do with an SSN) central coorditing authority that links all of your various accounts and acts as a switch-board between them. It can also potentially be used to confirm that the @-name you're sending a message to is connecting to the person you intend to be connecting with.

@scott\_bot Gotcha. I still think it's not the best option, but I see how it's not quite as poor an option as I thought initially.

@scott\_bot ha! True.

@dancohen @amit @smokey Follow-up: david.ely.fm/2018/08/1...

@dancohen I share with your concern about people not, or never, having a domain, which is partly why I suggested that “hierarchy” of options, and I guess I should have also said “In an ideal world, the canonical link is the homepage or blog”—but I do think that it’s something we should strive for—a domain of one’s own is as important today as a room of one’s own was for Woolf and that era.

If someone doesn’t have a domain and does have some other presence they consider canonical (anything from a social media profile to a faculty or student webpage on a university server), obviously when linking we should respect that (while at the same time, if we know the person, encouraging a domain), but for purposes of David’s orginial argument, in the event of multiple online presences, I think the homepage—certainly not Twitter—should be canonical for any sort of linking-to-a-person not tied to “notification of said person on the specific service”. // @amit @davextreme

@oyam I thought “dehumanizing” was a bit too strong of a term, but it was the only term that came to me when I was banging out the reply, so… ;-) And this maybe is splitting hairs, but the part that’s most bothersome to me is the @ symbol; take that away, and an @-name becomes just one’s name, or, as you say, a nickname. I have no problem using “oyam” (or “Oyam”) to refer to you if that’s the way you’ve decided you want to be identified in a certain place (particularly if you’ve not supplied a non-username-style name, e.g. the). But people insisting on using the @ symbol, especially in contexts where it is not necessary, really grates on me and makes me feel like they are ignoring my personhood in favor of a nomenclature designed for a computer in a system where people are not people but bits of data….

On your second point, I don’t think we totally disagree; one of @davextreme’s points in his article was that we should stop treating Twitter as the canonical site assumption when linking to people (and, by extension, when linking uses of @names in non-Twitter contexts), with the question of what should be the URL for such a canonical link when someone has multiple public presences on the Internet. My reply to that question was in such cases, we should (strive to) default to a person’s homepage wherever possible in such cases. We should also strive to respect any choices a user has made as to designating a canonical URL, but ceteris paribus give more weight to a homepage/owned domain. I think these rules apply to the web and open platforms more than siloed ones (where you’re often not doing any sort of linking, anyway, and where, within the silos, a canonical link is almost always automatically set by the software to your profile on that service).