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.

  • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org
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    3 months ago

    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.

  • WatDabney@sopuli.xyz
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    3 months ago

    I presume I’m supposed to care, but I dont, and I don’t know why anyone would.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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      3 months ago

      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.

      • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
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        3 months ago

        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.

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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          3 months ago

          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.

          • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
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            3 months ago

            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.

            • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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              3 months ago

              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.

              • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
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                3 months ago

                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.

                • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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                  3 months ago

                  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.

          • Darth_Mew@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            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

  • AstralPath@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    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.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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      3 months ago

      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?

        • AstralPath@lemmy.ca
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          3 months ago

          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.

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    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.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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      3 months ago

      Yep. Also, aren’t there already celebrities on Mastodon? I know George Takei is. Granted, you’d have to know he was @mastodon.social versus mstdn.social so that could complicate things for those unfamiliar with the platform.

      OP’s definitely got a point, though.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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      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.

      • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        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.)

  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    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.

  • NightOwl@lemmy.one
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    3 months ago

    I’m not here for celebrities and they will always flock to centralized platforms anyways, since they are all about the views.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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      3 months ago

      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.

      • NightOwl@lemmy.one
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        3 months ago

        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.

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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          3 months ago

          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.

          • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.org
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            3 months ago

            “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

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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      3 months ago

      Because there can only be one taylorswift13.

      There aren’t multiple instances on twitter.

      • RandomVideos@programming.dev
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        3 months ago

        There is also only 1 taylorswift@lemmy.world

        Why would there being extra numbers or a different instace change anything?

  • Today@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I think it might be kind of nice to be Tom Hanks and have the name WilsonsOnlyFriend@lemmy.world and just chat and chill.

    • LiveLM@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      How fun, this should go on a ‘Best of the Fediverse’ type post or something.

  • reddig33@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Reminds me of ICANN fucking up all the domain names.

    CocaCola.com CocaCola.new CocaCola.drink Cocacola.world CocaCola.bev

    Etc.

    Shameful. One thing that might work for the fediverse is federal institutions running their own Mastadon instances on .gov to move away from announcements on Twitter. You can’t fake .gov domains.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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      3 months ago

      I don’t know who Artie Show is. You could have told me you were Artie Shaw, and I’d have not questioned it. I’d have just thought that was your name.

      • ArtieShaw@fedia.io
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        3 months ago

        I didn’t really expect anyone to know that, which was sort of the joke. He was very famous in his time, but by now it’s a bit of a deep cut.

        Artie Shaw was a clarinetist who ran a jazz band. In addition to that, he was also quite the weirdo. Womanizer, liked math a lot (like more than is natural), was an expert marksman who was nationally ranked in that sort of thing, and really into fly fishing. Also, currently, very dead. And that’s good because otherwise he’d be 114.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artie_Shaw

        here’s a sample of his work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_v3GY3ZqdM