@prehensile and even then, you might feel like your handle in a few years time represents the "old you" so in the end you change anyway, speaking from experience
@maia @prehensile @meave was just about to comment this bc this is like my 4th Account on my own instance lmao
I gave up anonymity after KiwiFarms doxxed me and I thought I'd pull a gigachad and go full-public. It's actually quite liberating.
@prehensile my time from "joining the fediverse with my deadname as an account name" to "making this account because i confirmed i was trans" was a month and 2 days
i had a feeling i was going to change it anyway but it was pretty fast
@prehensile Took about five years for me but I’m probably a statistical outlier.
i'd be suprised if you were an outlier, it took around three to four years over here to figure myself out. and to be honest, i'm still working on it
@prehensile Made that mistake myself.
@prehensile this is something that I wish that I knew years ago while using my real name for every service.
At least I got to purge a lot of old accounts!
@david there's definitely something satisfying about retiring a gmail account that's old enough to drive
@prehensile @david oof, real. Been trying to decide what to do. I feel like transferring things would be a butt, but I’m not sure I’m ready to let go…
@b_cavello @prehensile Thankfully it's really not! Devote a bit of time to it to clean it up and not just transfer all of the junk. But most platforms now, gmail included, have easy import and export tools for email, contacts, and calendars.
Several years ago I moved all of my gmail stuff to Fastmail, after purging over 99% of my email as unneeded junk. Then I kept a forwarder going for a few years, just in case.
@prehensile lol soooo fuckin' true
@prehensile I've been here all of two days and I've already been looking at my real name on other social media (it's not 'Steve') and thinking "ehh, something doesn't look right about it..."
@prehensile I signed up as a throwaway "IceWolf" and that led to me randomly picking "Frost" on a MUCK and...
...and that's my name now.
@prehensile if I had a nickel for every time I made that mistake…
@prehensile Why would I want to change my username though? If I switch to another instance I'd probably keep this as well.
@prehensile I chose a new name that was close to my new name because my email starts with my initial. So now I don’t have to change emails.
@cate @prehensile
Same, but with my mail domain.
Apparently, Vi is recognized as a legal name here so I just need to wait until new laws are passed so I can legally change it.
@prehensile never even wished to...for that we got FaceCrook
@prehensile pretty solid advice
@prehensile totally unrelated but @sky is there any way I can get a username change done
@sks316 @prehensile Unfortunately no, you would have to migrate your account to a new username. Mastodon does not support username changes.
@prehensile this is hilarious because I literally created a new account the other day exactly for this reason
@prehensile @crazypedia and then there’s democracy social -_-
@prehensile it sounds so threatening, like something terrible happened to somebody who used their legal name, but I assume you're talking about oops I transed myself … which happened to me after a few years on the fedi
@alinanorakari yeah if I had to do this toot over again I would make it more clear that 'it' refers to your legal name lol
@prehensile @alinanorakari the message works either way!
@carcinopithecus @alinanorakari
mastodon makes you trans 🤝 never dox yourself
@alinanorakari @prehensile i can see how it seems ominous though as someone who got into the internet as a minor in the 90s under the "never give your personal information to strangers on the internet" paradigm this just felt like an important reminder to kill the facebook in our heads
@carcinopithecus @alinanorakari @prehensile Speaking of which, what happened to the "never give your personal information to strangers on the internet" paradigm?
@carcinopithecus @alinanorakari @prehensile (shakes fist) Facebook!!!
@alinanorakari @prehensile I thought it was “because you’ll become an anarchist if you aren’t already and will want an account not connected to your real world identity for opsec reasons” but this is true too lol
@prehensile switched to using my first initial as a user name and then not a even whole year later…
@prehensile Why would I use a deadname?
@prehensile "because you'll want to transition or because you'll get into activism that you better hide from cops?" yes