Serious #Fediverse Question: why do we, as users, need to know what instance another user is on? I understand for when you’re atting somebody, but generally speaking, does “@instance.domain” really need to be included after every reference to a user?
@realcaseyrollins It's an obstacle to impersonation. On Twitter you can get away with "parody accounts" but that's frowned upon in most of the Fediverse.
For example, let's assume I register @realcaseyrollins@example.com and set it up with your profile picture and display name. Then I can post whatever I want there, and boost it on my main account. If the domain is hidden, it's indistinguishable from me boosting your real account - and sure, the user could open the compose-reply window to see if the mention has "@counter.fedi.live" or "@example.com", but there isn't any indication even that something's amiss and warrants investigation.
@khird Ah that is true. Although theoretically the software could tell if there are multiple people with the same @ across different instances and then show the “@example.com” in light of that
@realcaseyrollins Possibly, although not all instances are aware of one another, so there might be some edge cases where that strategy fails. I don't understand the server-to-server communication in the Fediverse as well as I understand the client-to-server communication, so I can't invent an exact scenario to exploit it.
What benefit are you hoping to get from this? If you're going to disambiguate homonymic users, users with alts won't have their names shortened anyway.
The issue is that even an instance doesn't know all the users in the fediverse and which users an instance is aware of changes by the minute and ultimately is defined by the local users themselves.
so if you type a username without a server ending the local instance would have no way to determine if it could autodiscover the instance taht user is on or not. Just because it knows of one and only one user by that name it simply isnt enough information.
It is the same reason you need a full path when sending an email actually.
@khird @realcaseyrollins