[Terr_]

> I think of likely reasons this happens is username exhaustion.

I disagree, there is a solution out there, it's just more work because the client-software has to be smarter. We can take inspiration from how our meat-space society functions, where everybody maintains their own contextual aliases as metadata, something that can be personalized or shared.

For example, imagine we have a big global commenting site, and my own metadata says "Terr_ believes ID 49985189215 is Bob Smith."

When I ask the software to contact "Bob Smith", it knows who I mean from that mapping. When I publish something for other people to see and add a special reference to Bob Smith, it contains "{49985189215 which author knows as "Bob Smith}". People who already know 49985189215 as "Bobby Smith" would see that pop up on their screen instead, and the rare few which have a conflicting "Bob Smith" would see it rendered differently, making it obvious I don't mean their Bob Smith.

It gets more complex though when you consider the same user with multiple contexts: "I'll call Bob" at home might easily be a totally different person than "I'll call Bob" in the workplace.

[numpad0]

Yeah exactly my thinking. The user 499…215 is going to have some his own identity, but is also socially defined in contexts of friends or social bubble system like Google+ Circles/Discord Server/Mastodon Instance. That has to become the default over coming decade, perhaps half a decade.