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Aliases are hard, perhaps impossible, on the modern Web

~shoebx

This place looks really nice. There's a bit of dust in some corners, some splinted wood here, some discoloration there. I really like it, gives the pub a really nice charm.

I was unsure on what to say for a while until I realized that the best way is to probably just do it. Obviously, I'm also going to start with a heavy one; what could go wrong? ;)

As I said in my presentation, this is my first "real" alias that isn't publicly traceable back to my real person. Ever since I made it, I couldn't stop to think about it. Everybody discusses compartmentalization but nobody discusses the real dynamics of such a thing.

I feel like people don't choose many different aliases anymore not only due to cultural influences but also because, in practice, you really can't do that anymore on the modern Web.

Let's start with an observation: you can't change your alias if you don't want to lose your friends; If you change identity, how can they recognize you? They must know your new alias, building a chain, piece by piece. Back then, when the web was this big group of islands, this wasn't an issue; you would never have all of your friends in the same places, I imagine. But now, as the Web is mainly formed by these huge lands, how can you keep your identity split?

Let me elaborate. Let's say I have a bunch of friends which all know each other. One is on Discord and Steam, the other uses Steam and Reddit and another one instead uses everything already mentioned and something else too. Supposing I used a different alias for each platform, it doesn't take much to make all my aliases known, potentially publicly if I start "crosslinking" stuff out of necessity, which nowadays platforms like Discord also encourage at the profile level.

Instead of making a chain, you made a "web" of aliases. You've just diluted the problem, not fixed it.

Over time, with my main alias, despite many changes, I have noticed that I can't break that chain: I have a presence, an identity and, perhaps most importantly, friends. All of a sudden, I find myself stuck.

That's why, despite being so techy and privacy-conscious for all these years, I just got my first new alias here. The new Web and its big "agglomeration" of services has had this huge side effect that I've never seen anybody discuss (or at least not explicitly). It became a feedback loop, reinforcing certain habits, headed who knows where.

I never realized this before and now I'm very curious to know if someone else here has had similar experiences, since I never heard of this phenomenon explicitly before.

~bartender, I think I'll need an espresso after this please. A short one, no sugar, thanks.

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Replies

~detritus wrote:

Hi ~shoebx!

I am also taking a sort of "permanent" alias for the first time in the smolweb. In the past I would either use anonymous sites, or I would use random words as aliases, for example on IRC, where I would ensure anonymity that way. Every now and then I would keep an alias for a few days while I kept an ongoing conversation.

I also used Discord for a while, where I also kept a single alias and more or less became part of a community for a while. But I am not a very discord kind of person. I like sites like this where the conversation can take place at a more leisurely pace and I don't have to be there the whole time, I can take my time to reply, and I can make longer replies. That's how I do.

So for the first time in a long while I decided to establish an alias to develop a voice for self expression, in smol.pub. It has been kind of hard, because I try to make up a persona and keep some sort of consistency in my writings. On the other hand, that part of me that unfolds when writing on the internet tends to be rather... cynical, and I am not sure if I want to come off all the time as a sort of jaded pessimist. It is hard for me to keep a balance of the qualities I like in an online persona that I try to builds, after all, an alias is a character that one assumes for the purpose of social communication.

Bun in general, I am most fond of anonymous media, I like small sites where, even though everybody remains anonymous, one can always identify the underlying presence of a handful of recurring people, so there is an ongoing conversation where voices get mixed in an undifferentiated homogeneous mass, and yet manage to emerge a sort of overall personality and tone.

Such are the wonders of the internet. I am just happy to be as far away as possible from the big busy hubs of mostly worthless compulsive activity.

~inquiry wrote (thread):

The only place online I feel truly free of identity hysteria is write/read accessed in this Lua script:

#! /usr/bin/env lua
if arg[1] then
  local handle = io.popen('mktemp')
  local file = handle:read()
  handle:close()
  os.execute('echo "classifieds" >' .. file)
  os.execute('echo "REPLACE" >>' .. file)
  os.execute('vic ' .. file)
  os.execute('echo "." >>' .. file)
  io.write('=== Post? (Ctrl-d == NO) ')
  local answer = io.stdin:read('*l')
  if answer then
    print('=== Posting...')
    local command = 'nc nightfall.city 1915 <' .. file
    print('=== ' .. command)
    os.execute(command)
  else
    print()
  end
  io.write('=== Delete ' .. file .. ' ? (Ctrl-d == NO) ')
  answer = io.stdin:read('*l')
  if answer then
    os.execute('rm ' .. file)
    print('=== Deleted ' .. file)
  else
    print('\n=== Kept ' .. file)
  end
else
  os.execute('elinks https://portal.mozz.us/nex/nightfall.city/classifieds/')
end