I've been thinking about the Fediverse for a looooong time, since before it was called the Fediverse. I'll admit my thinking hasn't evolved much for much of that time. The basic structure of it has been clear for nearly 15 years.

But today (so far - it's only 8:30 AM here!) I've learned *three* new perspectives that have changed/improved the way I think about the Fediverse/Mastodon in subtle but important ways.

So. Much. Gratitude. 🙏❤️

TIL🧵3/3: I shared my belief that email addresses have been successful as a format for online social identities because of a very long historical, verging on biological precedent. I used an example that I've used for over a decade, that "Jesus of Nazareth" is essentially an email address.

Several folks chimed in with something that's obvious in retrospect but I'll sheepishly admit had never occurred to me (or, if it had, I'd long since forgotten): many surnames work *explicitly* this way. The "von"/"van" suffix in Germanic communities, "de" in French, and "da" in Italian, to name but a few.

Many other naming traditions work effectively this way, too. There are far too many to list here, but Wikipedia has a reasonably complete compendium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_family_name_affixes

I've been thinking a lot about naming lately, and allowed myself to go down the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name rabbit hole. This sentence in particular jumped out at me as relevant to the current moment:

"It is nearly universal for people to have names; the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child declares that a child has the right to a name from birth."

We need to guarantee the right to names online, and we need to do so in a way that gives people the ability to self-identify, apart from corporate control. Without the ability to control it, a URL, especially one that you don't own (like "twitter.com/blaine") isn't a name. It's an identifier, like a brand on cattle. Okay, that might be a little extreme, but it's not a name in the UN CRC sense of the word.

(I seem to have accidentally broken this thread, reposting here for continuity)

While thinking about this, I'm keeping @shengokai's words close – email is a great format for many naming traditions, but e.g. many Asian cultures invert the order (e.g., 何殷震) and many indigenous peoples in the part of the world I'm from use relational naming systems that operate more like modern petname systems.

I strongly believe that technical interoperability of names and data flows are critical to ensure our ability to communicate free of the corporate enclosure of speech, but that interop must not come with a colonial erasure of social customs.