💾 Archived View for capsule.usebox.net › gemlog › 20220118-re-pseudonymous.gmi captured on 2023-04-19 at 22:29:54. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-03-01)
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Posted Tue 18 Jan, 2022.
Marginalia wrote:
A person might think I'm illusive, writing and working under a pseudonym. It's not that I'm hiding, if you send me an email, I'll respond to you with an email address containing a decent chunk of my real name. It's not out of shame I wear clothes.
And Szczezuja responded:
Decades later, the net is different. We were bombarded by era of professionals, who introduced whole official accounts, and name and surname domains. In the most cases professionals mean that there aren't place for non-commercial net. People became live visit cards, for their businesses. [...]
Which is something I've been thinking about recently, in the context of social media, where I won't engage with some anonymous trolls because it is *me* with my real name. As Szczezuja says, my profile is almost a "visit card". I wish social media was space for civil conversation where I'm not worried someone could make my life complicated, but that's where we are today.
Back in the 90s, my perception is that we all used nicknames. I don't know if it was because I was younger and Internet was a new thing, or because that was what most people did: you protected your identity, by default.
There was also a technical component, because applications such as IRC asked you for a nickname (and a username, but that was only to identify you *on that service*), but the entities providing those services didn't collect as much personal data as they could as it happens with most of the social media.
But then, at some point early 2000s I decided that a big part of what I was doing on the Internet could help me professionally, so I started to have a stable presence on the net. Yes, you can still use a nickname, but it shouldn't be impossible to benefit from your open source contributions, your "know how" via blog posts and mailing lists, and your connections. I got my first good gig thanks to this, and it served me well in several job interviews. I basically retired my old nickname, and started using a new one that I was comfortable to associate with my real identity.
A couple of weeks ago I was trying the AIOE news service to access to comp.infosystems.gemini, and in today's Internet, it is a bad idea to use your real email on the news. And I thought, should I use a nickname as well? Whatever you post it is likely to be archived, essentially for ever, so it might be a good idea.
I stared at the input text box for a while and I realised I couldn't use my usual nickname because, it is pretty much like using my real name at this point. You can just search it and you will find me easily.
I don't think there's a problem with a nickname linked to your real identity, or the Gemini community (for the most part). It is Internet today what makes things complicated.
What is the point to communicate with other if I can't be me? So I got to the conclusion that if I'm in a forum that I suspect it would need an anonymous identity, that means I should probably not be there.