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Is there a clear way to distinguish between people with identical display names? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I love that we can have screen names as well as the unique account username, but I'm wondering: if I look at a comment thread containing two people using the same display name (in the worst case, where one is trying to impersonate the other) is there a clear indicator to see that Person A is not Person B?

In discord this used to be done with the four digit number after the display name, but that doesn't seem to be a thing here, and so far as I can tell it's not displaying my account name on my comments and posts.

I worry that, as Lemmy grows, perhaps an issue with impersonators could develop if distinguishing between different users with the same display name requires checking their account pages, since most people won't check. But maybe I'm missing something?

To be clear, I'm not remotely arguing for getting rid of the display names. I love the display names, keep the display names. Especially when I'm just imagining a hypothetical future problem that may not even turn out to be much of a problem.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Based on what I see via browser, if you mouse over the name, you will see the username (versus the display name). I'm not sure how you'd tell in mobile.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Display names are probably here to stay, but representation of them can use some work.

For example, apps and clients could generate identicons (open source example) for full usernames and display those next to avatars. All you need is an algorithm that generates shapes and colours. This doesn't solve any kind of impersonation problem (you could just generate a domain that generates visibly similar usernames).

For example, this is just a simple round identicon (you'd want something longer, probably rectangular, to fit better into the website design): a mockup of what lemmy with jdenticons next to display names to distinguish between different users could look like

These icons should be generated on-device so you can't mess with them.