💾 Archived View for gem.billsmugs.com › gemlog › 2024-05-25-online-identity.gmi captured on 2024-06-16 at 12:26:17. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-05-26)
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Around the time I was first starting to create accounts on websites (in early secondary school), I was reading the 'Adventure Series' by Enid Blyton:
The Adventure Series (Wikipedia mirror)
The books are set in the good old days when children were allowed to disappear for hours or days (even while on holiday in unfamiliar settings), without their parents or guardians apparently being especially worried, despite the fact that seemingly every cave, ruin, or abandoned building was crawling with armed smugglers or similar villains.
The children team up with a secret policeman named Bill Cunningham, who first introduces himself under the alias "Bill Smugs" (which is then used throughout the series as the children's nickname for him). I enjoyed the books and thought Bill Smugs was a funny name, so started to occasionally pick 'billsmugs' as a username online. Over time, billsmugs became my standard choice of username (in part because it was rarely, if ever, already taken).
Much later, I released a game (Tileogo) on the (short-lived) PlayStation Mobile platform. To submit a game to the store, you needed to provide a website link, so I purchased billsmugs.com and used it for a simple Blogspot-powered website.
Long after PlayStation Mobile died, I started to get into photography and switched the domain over to point at my Tumblr page. The reason this capsule is a subdomain (gem.billsmugs.com, rather than just billsmugs.com) is because the plain domain pointed at Tumblr's server when I was setting this up. (This is no longer the case, but billsmugs.com currently still just redirects to Tumblr on the web - it gets quite a lot of (mostly automated) traffic to specific URLs, so I'm reluctant to break the link).
I've stuck with billsmugs all this time because it's a force of habit, it requires no thought when creating a new account somewhere, and it's often difficult/undesirable to change existing accounts and services. However, I always have the (possibly misguided?) impression that people see the name billsmugs and assume that:
Whereas, in reality:
One final, carefully considered, intellectual reason to consider changing is:
More seriously, 'billsmugs' originated as a throwaway spur-of-the-moment thing, a couple of decades ago. At the time, I thought I was creating a short-lived account on a random website, not defining the identity that would be associated with me and everything I create for my entire life! As I've matured and learnt more about myself, it no longer feels as comfortable a fit as it once did. I might decide to stick with it, but I want that to be a conscious decision and not just the result of momentum and picking the path of least resistance.
I read an interesting gemlog entry by winter recently, where they talk about using different usernames in different places and deliberately not linking them together:
gemini://tilde.club/~winter/gemlog/2024/4-17.gmi
I don't want to directly/openly link my real-world identity to my online one, but I'm not currently so concerned about linking my various online profiles together. My intention before reading winter's post was to use the same new username everywhere, going forward, and to continue to link/redirect between the old and new. Currently, this is still my plan (and I'll definitely keep any Gemini/web domains redirecting for the foreseeable future), but it has given me food for thought.
I don't know! I've been noting down ideas as they come to me but haven't yet hit on anything that feels right. At the moment I'm trying to pick something that would work well as a domain name (including being easy to say out loud without having to spell it out) as well as a username. Perhaps keeping them the same isn't that important? Maybe I should take a leaf out of winter's book and use more unique usernames for different things?
I'm writing this because I hope people will let me know what they think. If you have read/written anything on this subject, or you want to comment on anything I've said above, please do get in touch!
I'm particularly interested in people's interpretations/assumptions (or lack thereof) that they make based on people's usernames/domains. Are there aspects of a user/domain name that you think (or have experience of others thinking) help you to infer information about the person behind it (e.g. gender, age, nationality)? What about 'billsmugs' specifically? Have you ever been disappointed when you visit a website/capsule and found that the content is different to what you expected from the domain name?
As always, you can click here to send me a private, anonymous message via my capsule:
Or get in touch via Misfin:
misfin://contact@misfin.billsmugs.com
I may add more of these as I find them, or as people get in touch with responses.