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Comment by deltarholamda | Hacker News Reader

If you want to give somebody your handle, you say "@elonmusk," instead of saying "@elonmusk@mast.don.vanity.tld".

(I didn't think Horseshoe Theory would bring back bangpaths, but here we are.)

Personally I believe a big central silo for so-called public discussions is a terrible idea, but I do understand there is some value to it. However, there will always be a problem with this sort of thing because a very large number of people are morons and/or scolds, and they seem to have a lot of free time.

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> If you want to give somebody your handle, you say "@elonmusk," instead of saying "@elonmusk@mast.don.vanity.tld".

People seem to be using e-mail just fine…

Do they? I regularly have people think I work at their company when I tell them my email is <theircompanyname>@<mydomain.tld>. People try an add a ".com" to my 5 letter gTLD, and try and add a ".au" to any "@gmail.com" address.

Normal people struggle pretty hard with email. Or at least a fairly significant portion of them. Giving them something that looks like an email, doesn't work as one, and includes an additional @ sounds like a tech support nightmare.

They're not bang paths, but rather the standard user@host of email. Imagine the absurdity of arguing "if you want to give someone your screenname, you just say SteveCase instead of having to say stevecase@example.com"

What I don't get is why all of these services with the similar format have to adopt their own quirky address formatting, rather than piggybacking on the same format as email. I should be able to just tell people that I'm "someone@example.org", and have that work for email/matrix/mastondon/etc (and be autodiscovered!) with the appropriate hosting setup.

This is much more difficult for normal users.

You'd need to set up your domain of example.org to have some form of SRV or TXT record to say "example.org" points to "mastodon.social", or even records per user if you wanted granularity.

You could also use .well-known or other domain verification/pointer methods. However if I'm joe@gmail.com, how does another user on mastodon know how to contact me? Where is my home server?

Someone could maintain a centralised lookup DB with auth to show you own the address (and I believe Matrix allows for that optionally), however isn't that the opposite of what the fediverse is meant to be?

It only looks difficult because the custom has not been created for advanced users, to then trickle down into functionality for basic users.

If you own a domain, you or your registrar configures the appropriate A/SRV/TXTs to point services at your chosen service provider, just like is already done. If you use something like Gmail, then you're looking at Google to run a Mastodon server or at least a stub redirection server.

On the other hand, your per-server handles can be much shorter. For example, @tim@apple.com vs @TimCook. This also comes with built-in verification; @TimCook@freerobux.com is probably fake.

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