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I had the same reaction at first. But after some contemplation, I changed my mind. It's not so easy to say if there is a better alternative. We need way to sa

• YetAnotherNick 4y ago
  These are definitely better: @xyz.com/abc @abc.xyz.com
  • mg 4y ago
    I'm not sure. I don't like @abc.xyz.com at all. @xyz.com/abc has the nice benefit that it is like https://xyz.com/abc https://xyz.com/abc with only the https:// https:// part is changed. But "Written by @joe@someinstance.com" reads much nicer than "Written by @someinstance.com/joe".
  • huimang 4y ago
    Those are significantly worse, because they do not ambiguously state what @user@site does. This is such a minor thing to be up in arms about, aesthetically it looks fine and immediately communicates what it is.
    • mxuribe 4y ago
      I think this portion of the discussion on the ampersand satisfies the definition of "bike shedding", right? :-)
  • echelon 4y ago
    @xyz.com/abc is the best I've seen so far. I think inverting this is also a sweet spot. It lets you drop context if on a locally federated node: @abc/xyz.com @abc[/xyz.com] @abc The username first prioritizes the human, and the host instance lookup can be added with tooling [1]. We should weigh ergonomics, visual distinguishability, ease of parsing from plaintext (important), ease of typing, visual aesthetics, simplicity, and extensibility. We should collect dozens of candidate formats and weigh them on these (and more) dimensions. [1] (eg. autocomplete that doesn't change the previous buffer, unlike, for instance, Google Docs chips).
    • politician 4y ago
      There's really no reason not to use email addresses for this use case. Consider, http://username:password@www.example.com/path?query=1#hash http://username:password@www.example.com/path?query=1#hash Reduced to the parts that would actually matter (because username and path are redundant for this use case, and no one seriously embeds passwords in URLs), scheme://username@www.example.com So it seems that the design challenge is baking the scheme into zero or one glyphs. username@www.example.com Hey, that looks like an email address! A URL is an extended email address, an email address is a URL with default values.
      • echelon 4y ago
        > 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.
        • politician 4y ago
          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.
• darrenf 4y ago
  Given decades of ~abc for a home directory and xyz.com/~abc/ URLs, perhaps the tilde could be put to use yet again: ~abc@xyz.com
  • simongray 4y ago
    It isn't as easy to type as @. In fact, my keyboard doesn't even feature a tilde written on any of the keys, so I make it appear solely from muscle memory.
• nileshtrivedi 4y ago
  abc@xyz.com is definitely not taken for email. It works as a HTTP url, or SSH logins and it can very well work for ActivityPub.