don't understand the imposter concerns with mastodon.
literally, that's how the internet is. people could register pnathan@ for every dang email provider out there.
it almost feels like a litmus test for "people who don't understand technology".
but maybe I'm just tired and cranky. (which is true)
@pnathan Nick collision is a known problem with IRC; why repeat the same mistake here? There's no reason not to have a blockchain like username registration in place in the network; federation doesn't prevent the problem from being solved.
@andschwa I have profound skepticism about the use of blockchain for *anything* to be honest.
@andschwa that said, it doesn't address your core critique.
I'm not sure I would consider it a *problem. Any more than having other people with my own name. They are out there! Paul Nathan is not only a geek, he's a magician in Vegas/LA, and he's also a physician. I don't think it's realistic to demand uniqueness of nicks. Demanding uniqueness drives scarcity and nick-squatting.
There has to be a better way for identity than nicks.
@pnathan You know, that's true. And a good counterpoint in your direction would be lack of uniqueness around domain names: we saw that we quickly ran into squatting with .com, and eventually got many more TLDs.
@pnathan I did say "blockchain like" :P What I'm getting at is that the problem is tractable, and we've already encountered it before. Why not solve it instead of repeat the same mistake?