I said before, the biggest thing is handles. If Taylor Swift came to the fediverse, I assume her twitter handle is @TaylorSwift

If she came to Lemmy, or Mastodon, her handle would be “@TaylorSwift@Mastodon.social” or “@TaylorSwift@Lemmy.World”

But then I could myself register “@TaylorSwift@Lemm.ee” or “@TaylorSwift@Mastodon.world”

And I could just be Taylor Swift.

What she has to do, and this goes for any public figure, is protect her brand. Her brand is Taylor Swift. Anything at all which creates confusion or infringing on use regarding that name is a problem for her. She needs to keep Taylor Swift exclusively to herself.

Just as Kellogs would want all use of the word Kellogs to belong to them.

So to attract them, they won’t come unless they can be the sole and exclusive @TaylorSwift

That’s the important part. She wants to be @TaylorSwift.

Not @TaylorSwift@Mastodon.social.

So to do this, I shouldn’t be able to create an identical handle, on a different instance.

The fediverse needs to all communicate with each other. I don’t have a peertube account. But since I’m Lost_My_Mind, that exact handle should no longer be in the pool of available peertube account names. And if I were to sign up, with the email from this Lemmy account, I wouldn’t even chose a handle. It would automatically choose Lost_My_Mind. The accounts would be the same.

Because at the end of the day, what celbrities want is one easy place for all people to reach them. Right now with X and Bluesky being two systems that aren’t interconnected, this splits the audience. We already know America is divided. Almost down the middle.

So the LAST thing celebrities, and brands want is bluesky to take off. Because then you’d have X with its right wing views, and bluesky with it’s left wing views. And then brands will have to make two accounts. One on X, one on bluesky. They’d much rather say they have one account with 40 million followers than 2 accounts. One with 22 million followers, and another account with 18 million followers.

And the thing nobody is taking into consideration is the scaling of the fediverse. You can have all of X and all of bluesky on the fediverse. All decentralized. But because 98% won’t notice the decentralized aspect, they won’t care. They’ll just stick to their little corner of the fediverse. And you’ll stick to your corner, and in the middle will be brands.

And both sides can connect to brands from their corner of the fediverse. The only reason brands care to pick a side, is because analytics tells them one side is more likely to financially support them. But they’ll happily take subscribers and money from the other side. Red states? Blue states? Doesn’t matter. All they care about is green states!

And the potential is there. People who want a small fediverse can scale their individual view smaller. People who want it bigger can scale it bigger. It literally has the ability to please both sides wishes. It just has to be implemented properly.

But it may actually be already too late. The bluesky ball has started rolling. Sometimes it’s not about logic. You can have a factually better option, but still lose by having inferior numbers.

Right now, bluesky has an artificial solution to the handles issue. You’re @handle@bsky.app, but EVERYONE is @bsky.app unless you use a custom domain. So realistically you’re just @handle unless specified otherwise.

Same way a website is just website.com, even though it’s really www.website.com

The www. is implied, just like the @bsky.app is going to be implied as time goes on.