Have we forgotten about "fully-qualified names"? A positive side of our move to centralized walled gardens was the "flat namespace" there. On birdsite, I am "danyork" and THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE. And so everyone can reference me as "@danyork". Ditto on Facebook (dyork), Google+ (+DanYork) and so on. But this was a big change from email when we had to know someone's full address (or XMPP and jids). Now Mastodon brings this back. The price of DEcentralization. I am fine with it, personally.

@danyork indeed, it is twitter.com/danyork. It is like UK not printing their name in their stamps?

On a related note, when mastodon becomes successful and people migrate from one instance to another, their naming convention will come to bite. I just want to put it here for future reference.