I’m thinking about how emails ended up becoming. Where our first email addresses were so wacky, and slowly we just wanted out real names.

  • Ragnell@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I think if we get to the point that we need professional accounts that will happen. Like, say the US Government finally gets fed up with Twitter and establishes a mastodon so that the Dept of the Interior can talk to the public again. Maybe some people will have official mastodon accounts on that server, and use their real names.

    • Nepenthe@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      That, and likely Meta users, since everything they own tends to have a deeply-ingrained culture of putting your real name and face all over everything you say and do. It IS going to happen. Pretty sure a couple on kbin already do, and there are more professional instances especially on Mastodon. It’s a semi-common thing among eastern artists, from my experience.

      Personally, I’m never going to do that and I see no reason it should ever become the norm when we have quite literally a limitless supply even if someone already took your user.

    • Hellsadvocate@kbin.socialOP
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      1 year ago

      This is a really good point. Has there been any talk about how verification of users might work for when that does happen?

      • Ragnell@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I would imagine the instance is in charge of verification, and the instance itself will need to be verified.

        With US government stuff, I wouldn’t trust anything not .gov but I’m not sure how others will handle it.

      • cyberian_khatru@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Mastodon has a system that verifies an account’s possession of another webpage. So that could help with company accounts.

    • Mounticat@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      The way I’d imagine official instance accounts working is the governments launching their own .gov instance and restricting accounts to only verified government officials, or corporations doing the same thing on their own official domains. Then their posts are federated to whoever wants to see them (or people can just go to the instance).