You hear this a lot, but I don't really get this... Everyone is using email and I have never heard anyone complain "email implements a very very confusing username system" because [email protected] and [email protected] are not the same people.

Maybe it would help to make it more explicit that Mastodon works more like email than Twitter in that respect, but to be fair joinmastodon.org and also the new user onboarding tutorial do try hard to make that very clear.

A big difference is that with e-mail we've long ago stopped expecting discoverability. You don't expect to be able to search <insert random celebrity> and find their e-mail address. You do expect to be able to search for them on Twitter.

I think not being able to search for <random celebrity> is a good marker of how mastodon is trying to be something other than just a decentralized twitter clone. I personally find the twitter microblogging model, wherein most tweets seem to be retweets of high-profile users or comments on their posts, quite unhealthy for discussion among equals. Twitter is essentially a media site, whereas (I think) Mastodon hopes to be something else, more of a forum for actually taking to people. Whether it can work as/if the userbase grows remains to be seen, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

The other thing to keep in mind is that idiosyncratic norms and conventions pop up that are products of how people use the platform, and these have a way of turning problems into non-problems.

Maybe the network will just evolve to value interactions that aren't centered around brand pushing. Maybe it will let the rest of the social ecosystem take care of that and meanwhile mastodon will do it's own thing.

Or maybe a mastodon instance will seek to distinguish itself by providing this kind of verification and become the de-facto instance for verified brands. (There's already a mastodon that explicitly courts business brands.) Maybe we'll even discover that we just don't value such a thing that much, when it occurs on a network structured to make it easily separable from the rest of social activity.

All of which is not to say we should waive away the problem, only that it need not be a conversation-stopper when it comes to the question of whether mastodon has offers "enough" value in its current form.

In which case it is highly misleading when it is presented as an open source alternative to Twitter.

You do hear those complaints, but they tend to take the form of bemoaning the prevalence of phishing emails.

Perhaps it's just a different target audience. People who want to follow celebrities and and brands are certainly better off on Twitter. However, if my main interest is in interacting with individuals this isn't a problem at all.

I met a bunch of people on Mastodon whom I find interesting, and I have conversations with. There's no need for me to verify their identity because I'm enjoying the interactions I have with them.

This is really how internet was originally envisioned to work. You don't need to know anything about the person on the other end, the interaction itself is what's valuable.

On the flip side, Alice could have [email protected] thanks to federation. There isn't all that nice software for it yet, but that could be be an attractive option. It protects you from an external instance dying and links your user clearly to your other web presence.