upvote
I can’t disagree with this more. Even on discord I have four accounts for different contexts. One, my real name. Another, my gaming name. Another, my music/stage name. Another still, a different gaming name. Why? Because I don’t want people in any of those contexts knowing anything about who I am in the other contexts. This is a feature, not a bug.
reply
How do you do this in the modern era where websites demand a unique phone number for each account? I couldn't even set up one Discord account due to the phone number requirement, which at the time wouldn't accept numbers in the country I was living.
reply
Having global identities that move with you between networks doesn't mean that your identities need to be singular nor openly tied to your government identity.
reply
same here, i keep my game and tech groups on different accounts. that's one thing that keeps me from joining facebook. it doesn't allow pseudonymous identities.
reply
Agreed. I find it ironic that online communities thrived on the detachment between the virtual persona that posts are associated to and the real persona that is writing the posts, but for one reason or another some people insist in connecting both.

It's a "need to know" basis, and I don't need to know your face, I don't need to know your gender, your age, where you are from, what job you have, I don't need to know your political affiliation, your religion, your other hobbies, what movies you watched, games you played, books you read, whom you follow, what communities you have joined. I don't need to know anything more than what the words in the post say.

When you "need" to know what is real you end up with social media like "BeReal" which is just an enormous privacy nightmare (requiring you to take photos at random times) just to make sure that people aren't editing photos or showing only the good aspects of their lives to the internet. Since when has "posting on the internet" become synonymous with a panopticon?

reply
> I think the lack of "global" identities has dramatically hampered community migration and evolution.

Do you know what that sounds like? The "feature" that lets some credit card subscriptions follow you across credit cards although you'd like to get rid of them thank you very much.

I don't want a global identity for all communities I'm part of. Joe from the bait and tackle group (i don't fish, is that a plausible fishing group name?) has no business knowing what games I play unless I personally tell him.

Moreover, that nice store that gave the bait and tackle group a 10% discount has ABSOLUTELY NO BUSINESS chasing me in MMO #245768.

reply
I guess I got my language wrong here. Maybe what I'm talking about is about portability more than global vs local. Identities should exist at a layer higher than any given social context, and should be "materialized" into that context with local information. It's not about using the same identity everywhere, it's about being able to take the identity where you want to. Similarly it's not about the same information being available everywhere, but information being relative to durable identities, not ephemeral ones.
reply
I don't think so. If you want to bring your identity re-use your alias, or oauth ID, otherwise enjoy the benefits of privacy.
reply