Why can you never change your username in Mastodon, Lemmy or Peertube? Is it a condition introduced by ActivityPub or a forgotten feature?
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One thing I like about bluesky is that your identity doesn’t have to be tied to an instance domain - you’d still have issues if you want to change is later, but if you plan ahead and use your domain you can just move it between instances.
Technically, changing usernames can be done on various Fediverse platforms following Mastodon’s protocol for moving to a different domain. There’s no reason why the source and destination domain would need to be the same.
Practically, usernames are used as unique identifiers in most ActivityPub and wider Fediverse implementations, making changing usernames quite difficult.
When you follow an account, you follow a username. This is looked up using a protocol called “WebFinger”, named after the old UNIX “finger” command. This could in theory return something akin to a user ID rather than a link to a document with a user name, but I haven’t seen many implementations of that.
You can change your display name but your user handle is fixed.
I imagine being able to change your user handle could cause issues with federation. If you changed your user handle, your instance would have to notify all other instances. If one instance didn’t get this information, your account before and after the change would look like two separate accounts on that instance.
It’s really annoying that the unique identifier is the username and domain instead of an ID. My fiance switched her nationality and therefore her legal name, but there is no way to change it in PeerTube where I made an account for her. OK theoretically we can create a new account and change the ownership of each of her videos but there are hundreds of them.
Man, it seems so alien to me to use anything related to your legal identity as a username online.
I just put everyone’s first name there as the username for the whole family.
I wonder if it’s possible to batch-edit the database to auto-change ownership…
Probably, but I’d need to understand the database schema for it. Don’t really have time for that.
I believe it’s not possible because it would untie the user from all of their comments and posts that seen on “any other website connected to the Fediverse”.
Only your instance can know who you are if you change your username but other instances couldn’t know that.
You can migrate to a new account… this can achieve the same thing. It doesn’t always work as well as you’d wish though
Isn’t migration reliant on third party tools or your own effort to resubscribe and whatnot?
I migrated masto instances without complications, but some people have had a worse experience than I
You’re pretty much asking “why can’t I change my email”
You can make a new one if you want.
And what’s wrong with asking that? Plenty of email platforms let you change your primary SMTP address and/or add/remove aliases.
It’s a legitimate question. And it could be that the lack of ability to change it has a perfectly logical answer. It still wouldn’t invalidate the question.
FWIW it wouldn’t have been that hard to use unique identifiers rather than usernames for the technical implementation of following people. The ActivityPub designers decided on using usernames rather than unique IDs as the primary identification of a user, but they could’ve chosen something else.
It’s not possible to change your username without something like Mastodon’s move mechanism (that’s poorly supported outside of Mastodon), but the question itself isn’t that crazy. For instance, Bluesky is a federated protocol and they use unique IDs, allowing people to change their usernames in a federated system.
ActivityPub could do this as well (just let the WebFinger service link to a user ID based URL rather than a username based URL, so multiple account names could eventually redirect to the same user) but I don’t think it’s implemented that way in the popular ActivityPub servers.
You have a display name you can use to change the name everyone sees.
