Skip to content

Comment on Democratizing social media, with the freedom of moving around platforms freelyparent

Comments

There's really no reason not to use email addresses for this use case.

As elegant as that would be, confusion could arise.

Email and federated identities might be intersecting sets, but not are not guaranteed to be either subsets or supersets of one another.

The ambiguity of this seems problematic.

I disagree, I think we should demand that `username@domain.com` (coupled with a digital signature) be the one true way (TM) that services treat identity. Whether domain.com supports an email service, an HTTP service, or a social service is secondary. Standardized representation of the principal is the primary concern.

Twitter and Facebook represent the principal using their own alternative formats to assert ownership over the domain, not because they're good formats (@foo, fb.com/you). They've normalized the idea that the textual representation of the principal should be different between different services, but there's no fundamental reason it should be so.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.