Unique user names in Discourse Hub

[tophee (Christoph)]

@codinghorror

seems like kind of a bad idea in retrospect. Why?

Well, if you run your own Discourse, and your name is @david, you probably want to be called @david, even if some other David reserved the name in Feburary 2013 here on meta. It is your community, after all, who are we to tell you that you can’t use your own name on your Discourse?

Mastodon solved this by appending the mastodon instance’s domain to your username, like an email address: codinghorror@meta.discourse.org. Boom!

[riking (Kane York)]

A fun thing it has is vanity domains, such as @toph@oulipo.social - a curious instantiation that disallows any utilization of that fifth Latin symbol (which is not in this posting).

[tophee (Christoph)]

I’m trying to understand what you’re saying, but it feels a bit like reading this:

Could you clarify?

[hellekin]

I actually wondered the same thing on Mastodon’s Discourse. And I just submitted a proposal that, if accepted, will provide funding for doing just that. ActivityPub support in Discourse sounds very promising.