An increasing proportion of our discourse occurs on the Internet - but it is increasingly fractured into echo chambers, which creates divides in society. The biggest cause of this is that if communities open up to dissenting views on polarising topics, it is very difficult to tell what is from an astroturfer / provocateur / troll who posts the same content under 50,000 names (possibly using AI technology), vs what is genuine. If using a uniquonym (a pseudonym that is unique - i.e. one real person can only have one within a particular namespace) brings trust that people are authentic, it should foster more genuine communication and re-unite communities.

One could argue that someone’s real name is the ultimate uniquonym. The trouble is that fear of surveillance and persecution also represses people on the Internet in many parts of the world. It is not reasonable to expect real world consequences for online actions if those real world consequences are persecution and the online actions are speaking truth to power. For that reason, a uniquonym is only unique within a namespace (e.g. a particular website, or a perhaps across a fediverse protocol) - and it should not be possible for anyone to work out someone’s real identity from a uniquonym, or to correlate uniquonyms across namespaces.

Some degree of compartmentalisation is good for privacy. There could be a convention of accepting several namespaces per protocol - but with a number, where claiming a uniquonym in a lower numbered namespace gives it more credibility. For example, if I have a name in the namespace lemmy_1, I might be more credible than if I have a name in lemmy_53123, which suggests I might have 53,123 other names as well in other numbered namespaces! This will allow people to have some degree of compartmentalisation of different identities, while protecting their real identity, and preventing non-genuine interactions.