for sure- or for someone less famous than one of the hundred domains we all memorize -
is philjamesson.com or pjamesson.com or philjamessoncomedy.com or philjamesson.net the real one etc.
Yeah. One of the most pervasive problems I’d argue of the “web” era is the conflicting needs for canonicalism (e.g. I want to know when I see a “Jack Nicholson” account that it’s that Jack Nicholson) with the fact that very few people have unique names or other obvious identifiers. And half of companies don’t either (e.g. the Beatles’ record label Apple Corps vs Apple, Inc. — which owns Apple.co.uk? Whoever grabbed it first, of course!)
Every service with handles is just another microcosm of the DNS system’s same problem, just usually with even fewer affordances for disambiguating (the DNS’s country codes and things like .org vs .com offer a single crude sorting system, but we’ve seen it solve very little since the move is to “buy ‘em all” if you’re big, witness how WWF the charity couldn’t peaceably coexist with WWF, now WWE just by using .org and .com)
The seems like it would best be solved with an additional, optional attestation layer on top of domain-based uniqueness though.
Nobody cares if I'm ethbr1 or ethbr2. Uniqueness and stability suffices for me.
People do care if {famous person} is {famous person}. Therefore there should be some attestation process for mapping who the current official domain is for {famous person}.
Attestation is a great way to think about this, similar to cosign/sigstore. We can label an existing record or associate new records with it to support this feature. Multiple entities can attest and their track record, transparency, and reputation can feed into those which people decide they trust
What I like about ATProto is that it is decoupled like this, even if it still has weak points in terms of decentralization. We can build and extend outside of the choices and governance of Bluesky. It is a true platform in the sense that will make the participants more money than the originators in the long run
Every service with handles is just another microcosm of the DNS system’s same problem, just usually with even fewer affordances for disambiguating (the DNS’s country codes and things like .org vs .com offer a single crude sorting system, but we’ve seen it solve very little since the move is to “buy ‘em all” if you’re big, witness how WWF the charity couldn’t peaceably coexist with WWF, now WWE just by using .org and .com)