A few days ago there was a discussion on the Social Web Incubator Community Group mailing list about fediverse handles. I sent an email to the list that I want to capture on my blog here.

There is also a relevant issue in Mastodon’s repo, with comments going back to 2022. While I’m not optimistic that this will be on Mastodon’s radar soon, I think it’s worth continuing to push for.

Hi Johannes and everyone,

This has been a good discussion, and I wasn’t going to chime in, but I feel that someone should make the case for eventually standardizing on simple domains and subdomains for handles. I bring this up because it could influence what the answer to Johannes’s question is.

Right now, the clear convention is Mastodon / WebFinger-style handles:

@manton@example.com

There are two problems with this: it looks like an email address, even with the “@” prefix, and it implies identity is usually tied to a server that someone else is running. There is no natural progression for solo instances in the way there is with subdomain → domain name .

I would love to see a gradual transition to:

@manton.example.com

And simply:

@manton.org

This is obviously a big change and won’t happen soon, but I think it’s worth working toward. There have been proposals to map it in a compatible way with existing software too, e.g. special names with an underscore like ?resource=acct:_@manton.example.com. ActivityPub itself wouldn’t need any changes.

I don’t see how we’ll ever get to a universal social web identifier — one where you could put a single handle on a business card and it works across blogs, the fediverse, atmosphere, etc. — without doing this.