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because that is your identity, the full "user@domain" the domain you are on is an intrinsic part of addressing to get to your account. so the question then beco
by somat 4y ago
because that is your identity, the full "user@domain" the domain you are on is an intrinsic part of addressing to get to your account. so the question then becomes why can't you change your name? and it has mainly to do with avoiding name conflicts in administratively isolated systems.
A major problem in distributed systems is names. one solution is to do what dns did, you can have nice names but you only get to pick them under the part of the hierarchy you control. another solution is to do what git or ipfs does. nobody gets useful names but at least you don't need any sort of central name database.
mastodon went the dns/email route, which makes sense people want nice names. but now your name is stuck on your domain. perhaps someone could have setup a central name server to avoid name collisions, but who would you trust to run it? what happens when it goes down? might as well just use dns.
Off tangent opinion on names in a federated system.
Unfortunately mastodon adopted the twitter style "@user" but because this only make sense in the context of a single domain mastodon mainly uses the awkward form "@user@domain" I think the email/xmpp form "user@domain" would have been better, but if they felt the @ prefix was critical to the experience of a twitter like micro blog than they probably should have adopted the form "@user.domain"
- KirillPanov 4y ago> because that is your identity That seems like a very, very poor choice. I have the same concern with Matrix.
- somat 4y agoIt is actually a better question than I initially thought. the question actually challenges all sorts of assumptions we make about how the internet works. in this regards it reminds me of IPFS. And while ipfs has some very cool tech the main thing it has problems with are names. ipfs has no names, which sucks. there is a name system ipns but it does not help much. ipfs does a publish/subscribe subsystem which I find one of the most compelling parts. it is however considered experamental and inefficient. this did not stop me from writing a distributed video streaming system using it. which turns out to suck, no names, and, even on my local network I was getting ~ 2 minutes of lag, no one would put up with that for streaming. https://nl1.outband.net/fossil/ipfs_stream/doc/tip/readme.md https://nl1.outband.net/fossil/ipfs_stream/doc/tip/readme.md
- Aeolun 4y ago> That seems like a very, very poor choice. By all means, enlighten us to the better one. It seems like they made a tradeoff here, and one that’s most in line with keeping everything distributed.
- deroanth 4y agoI don't know that I'd agree that it's a "very, very poor choice" but I can see how it would prevent Mastodon from seeing more widespread adoption. If widespread adoption isn't their goal, then it really doesn't matter though, and as you said, they made a tradeoff. I can definitely see the benefits of both ways of handling users.
- Sargos 4y ago>perhaps someone could have setup a central name server to avoid name collisions, but who would you trust to run it? what happens when it goes down? might as well just use dns. ENS (https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/) solves this problem rather elegantly. A single source of truth that is decentralized so any app can use it without trusting anyone. It wasn't around when Mastadon was being built unfortunately but is useful for developers of new apps and protocols.
- fl0id 4y agono it doesn't. and you'd have to pay for names, which disqualifies it for mastodon like usage from the start.
- Sargos 4y agoCan you elaborate on how it doesn't? It ticks all of the boxes from your message. Only the top level namespaces require a purchase. Names for services (e.g. james.mastadon.eth) are free. A live example of this is Coinbase which gives users (name).cb.id for free. Once your service claims a namespace you have full control over it.