Identity beyond usernames, Lord I/O, July 2020

https://lord.io/blog/2020/usernames/

Proposing to get rid of variable labels or filenames may sound impossible, or wild, or unnecessary, but our industry’s waning love for the username shows there are numerous benefits to avoiding text-based unique tokens. If we want to move onward from these limitations, we shouldn’t look toward fixing the tokens themselves. We already know technically how to generate unique numeric identifiers, and we could easily just generate unique numbers for directories or programming language entities. Instead, Slack and Discord show us the main problem — plain text editing forces us to conflate our model of identity with our model for labels.

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