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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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.
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 have a display name you can use to change the name everyone sees.
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.
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.
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.
