On March 2nd, FediForum is hosting a special Growing the Open Social Web workshop. As part of registration, attendees are encouraged to submit a position paper with ideas for growing the social web.
I have a very specific proposal: we should move away from email-like user handles on the fediverse. This style of user identity has three problems:
- They are confusing to new users. They look like email addresses but aren’t.
- They work against portable identity. When you migrate to another server, your identity changes. This also adds friction during registration as new users are again confused about the implication of picking a server.
- They conflict with the identity used everywhere else on the web. Simple domain names and subdomains have been used on blogs for decades (and now for Bluesky usernames too).
ActivityPub already supports domain names. The next step would be to formalize how servers can gracefully handle both domain names and email-like user handles. Then we can talk about how onboarding and migration could be improved by embracing this.
Last year I also wrote an email and blog post about this.
