People still fretting about "owning" their username on every instance.

<morpheus>What if I told you that you never owned your username on the birdsite in the first place?</morpheus>

I can tell you with pretty good certainty that I own this username - at least, insofar as I have registered this domain name and I run this server. Like, my name shows up in there twice, so you know it's legit.

@lmorchard i dunno, you should probably sign each toot

Kindest regards,
Les Orchard

just so people will be really, really sure

@lmorchard People should never trust this identity to be me. Then again, they should probably give me the side eye in real life too.
@jrconlin I know for a fact that you are a cylon
@lmorchard The preferred term is "Toaster American"

@lmorchard this. Plus, perhaps they could be acquainted with a certain weird communication medium where they also do not "own" their usernames across all servers...

...e-mail.

@rysiek @lmorchard Or, ya know, real life.
@lou1306 THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE *draws sword* *adjusts fedora* @rysiek

@lmorchard @lou1306 not a fan of fedora. too beta for me.

Oh, you mean the hat.

@lmorchard Is that a thing? Do these people have email addresses with _every_ provider out there?
@lmorchard do these people also want to claim "their" email address on every email server? o.O
@lmorchard I think there is a valid criticism here that mastodon needs better UI/UX for identifying whether someone is is who you think they are.

@thelsdj @lmorchard Based on the saga of my wife and her namesake in the UK (who thinks [REDACTED]@gmail is _her_ email address) I'm pretty well convinced this is a Hard Problem in human psychology and we're going to be grappling with it forever.

... Not shortening people's handles, ever, might educate but would probably also suck UX-wise. Allowing assignment of petnames might also help. That's all I got.

@lmorchard How do they even handle multiples of a username? Still not totally understanding the distributed model.

@Jesse The first part (what most people think of as username) is unique per site, but no restrictions between sites.

Your "username" is not "Jesse" - it's [email protected] and that's unique across the web