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.
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.
I don’t.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
“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.
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I’m not your buddy, guy!
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
This is sounding like don_dickle2.0
I like that everyone knows that person
Was Don_Dickle banned or something?
No no, pretty sure he’s still around
Oh. That’s good. I’m a fan of his contributions to Lemmy for sure.
Funny thing of note, when he first started posting, I thought he was a girl. Not sure why. But for like 2 days I assumed Don was a woman.
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
No one should give a fuck if celebrities are here
I think you have forums confused with microblogs.
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That’s a feature, not a bug. Celebrity culture needs to get in the sea.
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.
It would solve the issue for people who look into it. But what if I registered AstralPath@Lemmy.World? I could pretend to be you. And because most people won’t check, I’d get away with it until people caught on.
Now if you make your living off your public image, and I say horrible things, your career could take a hit. Even if nothing I said is true, and its proven it was never you.
People will just remember “Hey, remember that time AstralPath admitted to having sex with their grandmother?”
“No, that wasn’t actually them.”
“Are you sure? I remember reading about it in (insert tabloid here)”.
And suddenly you have a legit reason not to use a platform that easily ruins your career through no fault of your own.
People will ALWAYS attempt to troll online for the memes. Remember Boaty McBoatface?
If your email address is lostmymind@outlook.com, what prevents someone to create lostmymind@gmail.com and pretend to be you?
If it was widely known that outlook was the legitimate suffix, there’s no need to worry about this. If SAG-AFTRA had their own instance then any actor’s account username associated with it would carry the suffix chosen by SAG-AFTRA.
TomHanks@sag-aftra.com for example.
TomHanks@lemmy.ml would be instantly recognizable as illegitimate.
This problem already exists in many different forms and is already managed well by the fact that celebrities’ real usernames are well known and bullshit posts from accounts trying to fake them are easily caught just by looking at the user name. There are plenty of parody accounts on X with very similar username formats. Is that a major problem for X users? Not from what I’ve seen.
A difference between kbin (and mbin?) vs lemmy (and pyfedi) - the former would show the entire name, including instance. If instance was not included, it was because it was local (so you could assume ‘@kbin.social’)
On lemmy/pyfedi the name shows up alone - though you can hover over and see the instance name. But at a glance I can see how someone could get confused. Not the best UX IMHO.
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.
Yep. Also, aren’t there already celebrities on Mastodon? I know George Takei is. Granted, you’d have to know he was
@mastodon.socialversusmstdn.socialso that could complicate things for those unfamiliar with the platform.OP’s definitely got a point, though.
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.
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.
Use a better client that shows you the information? The default UI does, so that’s firmly a problem you’ve inflicted on yourself.
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.
Who manages that centralized service? What prevents it from being bought out, or attacked?
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.
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.
Yes.
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.)
I’m not using any client. I’m just using the browser that came with my cell phone.
Can you even tell which of my comments came from Lemmy.World, and which comments didn’t?
Yes. Yes we can.
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 ?
Didn’t she just have a baby?
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.actordomain and set up the@me@tomhanks.actorAP 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.
Not sure what VC stands for…
But the Chinese boy with the broken leg is my 103 year old grandmother in a wheelchair. But he’s not actually Taylor Swift, which is the point of the comparison.
VC = venture capitalism.
The narwal bacons at midnight?
Please no
please seek help
I’m not here for celebrities and they will always flock to centralized platforms anyways, since they are all about the views.
they will always flock to centralized platforms anyways,
I’m trying to change that.
since they are all about the views.
Which is why if we make the fediverse normalized for celebrities to host content, they can get more views here.
I fully believe that this fediverse concept CAN be the future of the entire internet. Services that don’t even exist yet can integrate with the fediverse, and it can scale easily by it’s very nature. But there’s a LOT of rough edges that keep the normies away…for now.
Right now, the fediverse is more than just decentralized. It’s fractured.
Imagine posting an update on something, and it goes out to your mastodon, your Lemmy community, your pixelfed, and your peertube accounts. All at once. You wouldn’t follow services, you’d follow people.
But we’d need all these services to integrate with each other nicely. And part of that would be making it so you don’t have 7 different accounts for 7 different services. You have 1 account, and sign up for each service under that account.
All your notifications would go to the same place.
Your identity would be your username. People would know if it’s your username, it’s you.
But people here don’t really care that much about celebrities being here and maybe not even their username being unique. Could probably be anon1, anon2, etc and it wouldn’t matter that much, since real identity is probably not a draw for them. Focus on regular people wanting the userbase to want to use fediverse rather than celebrities which is an off-putting first impression and point of sale for lot of people here.
You need to pivot is what I’m saying to achieve what you want.
But you need to get the celebrities here first FOR the regular userbase to follow. Which is the whole point of the post.
It’s like those dog memes about the stick. “No take! Only throw!” Well, you have to take the stick first, THEN you can throw the stick.
Well, you need the celebrities here first, THEN the regular userbase will come.
So how do you get them here? Well first you make a list of every problem that would prevent a celebrity from coming here. Then iron out those rough edges first.
I’ve already talked in other posts prior how the only way to grow the userbase is to be welcoming of people that you have no interest in interacting with. But it’s fine. Because they don’t want to interact with you either. It doesn’t matter though because you can be on /c/Linuxmemes, and they can be on /c/homeandgarden.
And if Martha Stewart posted on /c/homeandgarden she’d bring her fanbase with her. And if Ozzy Osborn posted on /c/ozzybitesabat he’d bring his fanbase.
And so on and so on with each new celebrity. Some of them have overlap, some don’t. But you’re bringing more people, who create more instances, and then niche communities can develop. You get more people posting more content. And the platform grows with more varied topics than just politics, technology and video games.
Or you could ignore what the celebrities want, and google, and reddit, and instagram will always be the dominant platforms, while nobody will have ever heard of the fediverse.
I’m trying to bring the current system down.
“Celebrities” is quite a broad term.
I guess most people here were thinking about people they don’t really share values with (let’s say reality tv influencers for instance). On the other hand, if someone like Keanu Reeves for instance would do an AMA here, I’m pretty sure everyone would be happy and thankful for them to put some light on the Fediverse
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
We verified it was him by having him send us a message from his IG.
How fun, this should go on a ‘Best of the Fediverse’ type post or something.
Taylor Swift’s Twitter handle is @taylorswift13 and it doesn’t seem to be a problem for her.
Because there can only be one taylorswift13.
There aren’t multiple instances on twitter.
My point is there could be a @taylorswift but it doesn’t matter because people know which account is hers.
@pruwybn same for drakes instagram (champagnepapi)
Even without federation and such it’s an issue. Old twitter actually did a really good job of this, but other social networks have had problems in the past,
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/katie-hopkins-impersonated-parler/
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/02/republicans-parler-trolls-347737
We don’t have to guess if trolls will try to impersonate celebs and be successful at it, because it’s already happened elsewhere.
That said, there are two nice things about the fediverse. First, verification is explicitly not offered, so folks have to do the digging themselves to see if an account is official or not. (Which is as easy as checking a person’s web site). Or perhaps confusing a regular person’s account with a celeb of the same name.
Second, you can host your own instance. Celebs might not bother, but official gov’t agencies set up their own domains and websites - and in particular under domains like .gov which aren’t open to regular folks. So seeing if a gov’t agency is really authentic is potentially as simple as checking the domain that the instance is using.
I mean sure…but essentially you’re using the facts as they stand as justification that it will never work, when my whole point is that these facts as they stand need to change because they will never work unless we change them.
People keep using email, and domains as reasons for why it’s not an issue, but there’s a reason celebrities aren’t known for their email. You can tweet at celebrities, and you can follow celebrities on instagram, and all the other services, but you generally can’t email them.
Now, the reason for this is that celebrity wants to own the exact spelling and exact letter/number combination that they’re known for. I like to try to make things relatable to the person that I’m talking to, but let’s face it, abff08f4813c is a really really bad username for branding purposes. But, be that as it may, IF you were a celebrity, and everybody knew abff08f4813c on instagram, and everybody knew abff08f4813c on twitter, then if you were to come to the fediverse, you wouldn’t want a second abff08f4813c to exist. You would want to own “abff08f4813c” on every platform, even if you’re not on that platform. Even if you don’t use tiktok, you would want to make sure nobody else has the name abff08f4813c on tiktok.
The problem is, the fediverse is so fractured that’s not really logistically possible. Because if you try to sue one person on one other instance that has abff08f4813c, now suddenly 300 more abff08f4813c on 300 different instances all pop up.
What I’m suggesting is, no matter which instance you’re on, if you search abff08f4813c, the search should find that username, and direct you to the profile that corrilates with you. And even though that profile is only on one instance, it would make it so if I tried to make abff08f4813c, on another instance, I would be told that username is already taken.
From there, you could absolutely create an old twitter style verification system. And NOW celebrities will be more willing to use the fediverse. But until that changes, I don’t see any celebrity who values their own brand on an international scale, be willing to publically announce they are on the fediverse, and their fans can migrate to the fediverse to follow them.
I mean sure…but essentially you’re using the facts as they stand as justification that it will never work
More or less.
when my whole point is that these facts as they stand need to change because they will never work unless we change them.
I think to make that argument you’d have to first argue that this works elsewhere. But we see warnings like this, https://web.archive.org/web/20221104001618/https://old.reddit.com/r/TaylorSwift/comments/yljj15/swifties_be_warned_that_this_is_a_fake_account/ or like this, https://www.instagram.com/czaronline/p/CvAts_9MFDf/
then I’m not at all convinced that this is the case.
You can tweet at celebrities, and you can follow celebrities on instagram, and all the other services, but you generally can’t email them.
Perhaps it’s a generational thing? Back in the day you could. Bill Gates used to be reachable at bill.gates@microsoft.com and Jeff Bozos at jeff@amazon.com
On the flip side, just because a celebrity has a handle on a particular social media service doesn’t guarantee you can reach them. Taylor Swift has a tumblr but she hasn’t publicly used it in years.
People keep using email, and domains as reasons for why it’s not an issue, but there’s a reason celebrities aren’t known for their email.
What’s the reason? Two things come to my mind: first, Bill Gates supposedly said he had an entire team whose job was just to read and respond to his public email.
Second, email is direct contact, like a DM rather than a tweet (that everyone sees). The email equivalent would be a mailing list. If you want that, you can join Taylor Swift’s mailing list over at https://www.taylorswift.com/#mailing-list
you wouldn’t want a second abff08f4813c to exist.
I wouldn’t mind that much, tbh. Though considering the username in question, it’s very unlikely.
Even if you don’t use tiktok, you would want to make sure nobody else has the name abff08f4813c on tiktok.
Much harder with a name like Taylor Swift. How many other people have the same name? Even on twitter there’s a different taylorswift - so the famous singer is taylorswift13 there.
now suddenly 300 more abff08f4813c on 300 different instances all pop up.
My username is probably the wrong one to use for this example.
But more generally - does anyone want to be taylorswift@hotmail.com and taylorswift@gmail.com and taylorswift@outlook.com and taylorswift@yahoo.com all at once? (Well, okay, yes there probably is someone who wants that, with bad intentions, but practically speaking it’s kinda obvious that these aren’t all official email accounts by the singer.)
Because if you try to sue one person on one other instance that has abff08f4813c,
But Taylor Swift may not be able to sue the other person - she’s not the only one named Taylor Swift after all.
What I’m suggesting is, no matter which instance you’re on, if you search abff08f4813c, the search should find that username, and direct you to the profile that corrilates with you. And even though that profile is only on one instance, it would make it so if I tried to make abff08f4813c, on another instance, I would be told that username is already taken.
And then someone tries to be abffo8f4813c or abff08f48i3c.
I don’t see any celebrity who values their own brand on an international scale, be willing to publically announce they are on the fediverse,
uh … https://joinfediverse.wiki/Notable_Fediverse_accounts
and their fans can migrate to the fediverse to follow them.
I mean, there’s no accounting for the fans, sure. If anything, celebs seek out platforms that have lots of people to connect them with fans, rather than them bring fans to a platform, I’d guess.
From there, you could absolutely create an old twitter style verification system.
Sure, but it’s not a required step.
Mastodon.social could implement a mimic of the old twitter style verification system for folks who join that particular instance - and those joining another instance simply wouldn’t have the guarantee.
And then threads can implement the verification system for folks joining directly through threads - and again those joined on another instance simply wouldn’t have the guarantee.
And then Bluesky can …
I don’t really see anyone but a commercial company even trying to do this - it’d be a headache - and probably expensive - in terms of the requirements to protect the data used (such as identify card verification).
But I’d add - if someone could draft this up and show me a working prototype, I might be easier to convince. It’s a lot easier to think about something when you can play with an idea.
There is also only 1 taylorswift@lemmy.world
Why would there being extra numbers or a different instace change anything?
