Yeah, there's just no other way to go about it. People can't follow each other, because they could have multiple profiles. If they did, then I wouldn't be able to tell which of their profiles to send posts to. I follow my friend "Susie" for instance, then I post a message; do I send it to susie@instance1, susie@instance2, susie@instance3? It depends on which of those profiles followed me, whether or not I know they're all alt accounts for the same person. If susie@instance1 profile followed me, then it'd be refused if it got sent to susie@instance3.

Troublesome though, because what if this Susie followed me on all her profiles? Then I'd be sending my posts to her three times over. I guess that's fine, it just seems wasteful, and hard to display. And what if Susie reposted a message to all three accounts that I followed? She'd have to change the post author because the Fediverse requires you stay locked in the walled garden of one instance or another (thanks Gargron), so I'd get three identical messages from three Susies, differing only in which profile was the author.

My client could in theory dedup it, if I did somehow know that they were all alt accounts for Susie. Heck if I know how any of us would learn whose accounts are what person though. I really think having alt accounts is important, in case something happens to your instance, but since we don't use public key trust anchors, it's just really messy to deal with more than one account.

#Programming #Fediverse #rant