I’m running my own Mastodon instance and might run a Lemmy instance and others in the future, and there are a few immediate issues I’m already concerned about in that I’d love to be able to avoid having a whole bunch of unrelated usernames.

But webfinger responses only distinguish between mime types, and provide no additional hints, so while I now forward my webfinger queries from my main domain to my Mastodon instance, I’m not sure if I can replace that with a response that lists both Mastodon and Lemmy without breaking both (I also don’t know whether or not Lemmy handles aliasing the same way Mastodon does, but that’s me being unfamiliar with Lemmy). It’d be really nice to be able to have an alias point at multiple different fediverse accounts if you want to.

But that also raises additional usability issues with respect allowing picking which account to follow if there are multiple compatible options in a webfinger result…

There are many additional usability challenges there. E.g. if my Mastodon followers come across a Lemmy post I make on Mastodon, it’d be nice to have a mechanism to resolve back to my preferred alias (and vice versa) so they knew I’m me even if it’s coming from another platform. It’d be really hard to get all of this flow smoothly without confusing users.

But it’d also be enormously powerful if this is addressed even if only partially, because if admins can optionally be able to offer users unified identities across platforms they provide (or even aliasing to other instances entirely), it instantly turns the Fediverse from a collection of different platforms to something much more comprehensive that none of the centralised Twitter, Reddit, Instagram etc. “alternatives” can even hope to try to compete with.