I’m just using a web browser that came with my phone. And if they were all hidden, it wouldn’t matter.

You’d just register your username. And this would be good for all the fediverse platforms. Once you register your innitial name, only you could register other services under that name. So it’s always you. Even if you never register for a service, you registered the name.

Then, if you register a new service, even years later, you still have your name.

I’m not using any client. I’m just using the browser that came with my cell phone.

With the celebrities come their followers. Which is like 97% of the world. I’m trying to get that 97% to adopt the fediverse.

But they don’t come on their own. They go where their celebrities go. The celebrities bring content for their followers to consume.

You don’t want the fediverse to grow?

First time I hear about this account, I prefer Margot Robbie

Well, to begin with, let’s consider the lobster, which is a remarkable creature—remarkable not only for its physical structure but for what it represents in terms of hierarchical behavior, and in that regard, it becomes a fascinating lens through which we can understand something as intricate and contemporary as the cult of celebrity in modern society. Now, stay with me here because it may seem like a stretch at first, but I assure you the connection between these primordial crustaceans and the modern fixation on fame is anything but superficial. In fact, it cuts to the very heart of human nature and the evolutionary patterns that govern us.

Lobsters, as you may well know, have existed in their current form for over 350 million years. That’s older than the dinosaurs, older than trees, and certainly older than any social media platform or film studio. These creatures have survived through the ages, not by being passive, but by adapting, evolving, and competing within a well-established social hierarchy. They engage in fierce dominance battles, and from those battles, hierarchies are formed. The dominant lobster is more likely to mate, more likely to secure the best resources, and—this is key—more likely to succeed. Sound familiar?

Now, let’s leap from the seafloor to modern society. Humans, just like lobsters, are wired to respond to hierarchies. It’s not something we’ve constructed recently; it’s a fundamental part of our biology. We evolved within hierarchical structures, whether in small tribes or large civilizations. In many ways, we’re still those ancient, status-seeking creatures, but instead of fighting over resources at the bottom of the ocean, we’re jockeying for social recognition in our workplaces, our communities, and—here’s where it gets interesting—within the celebrity culture.

Now, why is that? Why do we elevate certain people to celebrity status and obsess over them? It’s because we’ve evolved to look up to those who seem to represent success within our hierarchy. Celebrities, by virtue of their fame, wealth, or skill, appear to occupy the top rungs of the social ladder. They become, in a sense, the dominant lobsters in our cultural ocean. But here’s the problem: unlike lobsters, whose hierarchies are based on tangible outcomes—who can fight, who can mate, who can survive—our celebrity culture is often based on something far more superficial: visibility, not competence.

Think about it. In today’s world, you don’t have to be particularly skilled or intelligent to become a celebrity. You don’t even have to provide any real value to society. Often, it’s simply a matter of being seen, of being talked about, of being placed on a pedestal. And what does that do to us, as individuals and as a society? Well, it distorts our sense of what is truly valuable. We start to elevate people who, in many cases, are not worthy of that elevation, and we undermine the natural hierarchy that should be based on merit, on contribution, on real competence.

This is where the cult of celebrity becomes toxic. In a healthy society, we should aspire to be like those who have demonstrated genuine ability, resilience, and virtue—qualities that, in an evolutionary sense, help the tribe or the group survive and thrive. But when we fixate on fame for fame’s sake, we create a kind of feedback loop of superficiality. We idolize people who, in many cases, are more fragile than the structures they’ve been elevated to. They become the hollow shells of dominant lobsters—creatures who have risen to the top not by strength, not by merit, but by the capricious winds of public attention.

This has real consequences. Young people, for example, grow up in a world where they’re bombarded with images of these so-called “dominant” figures. They’re told, implicitly, that the path to success is not through hard work, not through building something meaningful, but through the accumulation of attention. And that’s corrosive. It erodes our individual sense of purpose. It pulls us away from the things that actually matter: our relationships, our communities, our personal development.

Now, consider the lobster once again. In the natural world, when a lobster loses a fight and drops in the hierarchy, it doesn’t spiral into depression because it lost its Twitter followers. It doesn’t collapse under the weight of shame because it was de-platformed from some ephemeral stage. No, it resets its serotonin levels, re-calibrates its sense of place, and starts anew. But what happens to us when we buy into the cult of celebrity and we inevitably fail to live up to those impossible standards? We become disillusioned, resentful, and anxious because we’re measuring our self-worth against a false and fleeting ideal.

In a way, the cult of celebrity is a distorted reflection of the natural hierarchy that we’ve evolved within for million

But it would.

Imagine Kamala Harris as president had a mastodon account. And somebody else made a duplicate Kamala Harris account. And this duplicate announced that the United States has gone to war with Russia.

Except these media stations don’t know how the fediverse works. They don’t know what an instance is. They just see Kamala Harris on social media announcing war.

And in media you HAVE to be the first to break the news story. So now you have every major news outlet confirming nuclear war, and the nation is panicing.

Meanwhile, Harris is trying to figure out how this all started. And this whole thing maybe lasts 10-60 minutes before somebody notices the mistake. Then it takes time to correct themselves and calm everybody down.

All over something that isn’t happening. All because people don’t check sources.

Now this is an extreme example, but I could see it happening if the fediverse was bigger, under it’s current setup.

But you need to get the celebrities here first FOR the regular userbase to follow. Which is the whole point of the post.

It’s like those dog memes about the stick. “No take! Only throw!” Well, you have to take the stick first, THEN you can throw the stick.

Well, you need the celebrities here first, THEN the regular userbase will come.

So how do you get them here? Well first you make a list of every problem that would prevent a celebrity from coming here. Then iron out those rough edges first.

I’ve already talked in other posts prior how the only way to grow the userbase is to be welcoming of people that you have no interest in interacting with. But it’s fine. Because they don’t want to interact with you either. It doesn’t matter though because you can be on /c/Linuxmemes, and they can be on /c/homeandgarden.

And if Martha Stewart posted on /c/homeandgarden she’d bring her fanbase with her. And if Ozzy Osborn posted on /c/ozzybitesabat he’d bring his fanbase.

And so on and so on with each new celebrity. Some of them have overlap, some don’t. But you’re bringing more people, who create more instances, and then niche communities can develop. You get more people posting more content. And the platform grows with more varied topics than just politics, technology and video games.

Or you could ignore what the celebrities want, and google, and reddit, and instagram will always be the dominant platforms, while nobody will have ever heard of the fediverse.

I’m trying to bring the current system down.

I mean sure…but essentially you’re using the facts as they stand as justification that it will never work, when my whole point is that these facts as they stand need to change because they will never work unless we change them.

People keep using email, and domains as reasons for why it’s not an issue, but there’s a reason celebrities aren’t known for their email. You can tweet at celebrities, and you can follow celebrities on instagram, and all the other services, but you generally can’t email them.

Now, the reason for this is that celebrity wants to own the exact spelling and exact letter/number combination that they’re known for. I like to try to make things relatable to the person that I’m talking to, but let’s face it, abff08f4813c is a really really bad username for branding purposes. But, be that as it may, IF you were a celebrity, and everybody knew abff08f4813c on instagram, and everybody knew abff08f4813c on twitter, then if you were to come to the fediverse, you wouldn’t want a second abff08f4813c to exist. You would want to own “abff08f4813c” on every platform, even if you’re not on that platform. Even if you don’t use tiktok, you would want to make sure nobody else has the name abff08f4813c on tiktok.

The problem is, the fediverse is so fractured that’s not really logistically possible. Because if you try to sue one person on one other instance that has abff08f4813c, now suddenly 300 more abff08f4813c on 300 different instances all pop up.

What I’m suggesting is, no matter which instance you’re on, if you search abff08f4813c, the search should find that username, and direct you to the profile that corrilates with you. And even though that profile is only on one instance, it would make it so if I tried to make abff08f4813c, on another instance, I would be told that username is already taken.

From there, you could absolutely create an old twitter style verification system. And NOW celebrities will be more willing to use the fediverse. But until that changes, I don’t see any celebrity who values their own brand on an international scale, be willing to publically announce they are on the fediverse, and their fans can migrate to the fediverse to follow them.

If it was widely known that outlook was the legitimate suffix, there’s no need to worry about this. If SAG-AFTRA had their own instance then any actor’s account username associated with it would carry the suffix chosen by SAG-AFTRA.

TomHanks@sag-aftra.com for example.

TomHanks@lemmy.ml would be instantly recognizable as illegitimate.

This problem already exists in many different forms and is already managed well by the fact that celebrities’ real usernames are well known and bullshit posts from accounts trying to fake them are easily caught just by looking at the user name. There are plenty of parody accounts on X with very similar username formats. Is that a major problem for X users? Not from what I’ve seen.

A difference between kbin (and mbin?) vs lemmy (and pyfedi) - the former would show the entire name, including instance. If instance was not included, it was because it was local (so you could assume '@kbin.social')

On lemmy/pyfedi the name shows up alone - though you can hover over and see the instance name. But at a glance I can see how someone could get confused. Not the best UX IMHO.

Please no

fooloerrs

Typo, but kind of a cool word too. Like people who would fool around