Had a quick thought, did a quick mock. Feels like using the word "address" seems better as it implies that there's a "place" where the account handle is located. Just like "email address", this could be "social address" maybe?
@cheeaun not even sure the context here, I’m a big fan of “addresses” for resources ,but not for people. Because it “suggests” their identity has one primary location “where it lives,” when in fact any of us can have many of them. Handle (like alias) seems to respect those variances to me.
@partizan@cheeaun Noooo ‘Fediverse’ doesn’t mean anything to anyone who doesn’t already know what it is. Using ‘social address’ gives a clue to what this is.
@mjc@Brendanjones@partizan@cheeaun I guess the main issue is that one can have many "social addresses" - much like how one can have a billing address and a mailing address, or a delivery address - and they don't have to be the same.
Similarly, we have an e-mail address, but now we're also having a social address...which there can technically be multiple of, but unlike email, they can't be interchangeable or forwarded to a main address.
@AT1ST
Uh? I have many email addresses, too, and several of them are non-interchangeable. I don't advertise all of them in all contexts, either, just as I don't advertise all my messengers or even all of my phone numbers. Why would a social address be any different? @mjc@Brendanjones@partizan@cheeaun
@osma@mjc@Brendanjones@partizan@cheeaun The main difference is that, currently, email is much more interoperable - you can create an alias email for the same email address, but you can also take one email address and set it up so that things sent from it get forwarded immediately to another email address...so you don't need to be logged into both at the same time.
I'm guessing you're thinking of a separation between personal email and work/office emails?
@osma@mjc@Brendanjones@partizan@cheeaun To clarify, I have a student webmail that my current post secondary institution set up - and it's set up that any email sent to it gets sent to my personal email account.
It's not true for all cases, I suppose, but it's one way to essentially "Merge" them together.
Social addresses don't currently do that outside the Fediverse (Maybe Bluesky? But there's a lot that doesn't federate currently.).
Moving instances is analogous to merging/forwarding, and where the analogy breaks down it's because email and social are different and can't have perfectly analogous functions in all things.
Granted it doesn't work with siloed social, but email wasn't always interoperable either. Having a cross-platform concept of 'social address' makes clear the way that siloing is a failure of basic capability.
@mjc@AT1ST
Federated addressing recognizes that people have social presence in many places. That is, BOTH many places exist for people to have presence, and one person may have (for a multitude of reasons) many such places. Very much like email - we don't have just one.
But back to Mastodon's QR codes. They don't advertise a social address, but a web site (URL). I for one have no interest in advertising Mastodon - I have my own web sites for that situation.
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