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How Many?

Any ideal solution should account for some users having hundreds or thousands of identities. Most users will only have a handful, somewhere in the 2-30 range, but I know multiple systems that are hovering around 100 or so.

PluralKit has a default limit of 1000 identities for an account. I went and asked some communities I'm in and learned that some systems do hit that limit, and ask for that limit to be increased for their account.

There's a variety of reasons for that, but the end consequence is the same: UX and protocol decisions should accommodate a large number of identities linked to an account. Friction for creating and modifying identities should be low. A large quantity of identities should not cause performance problems. Any hard-cap on the number of identities an account can have should be generous. Most people will not approach those numbers, but some will.

Obviously there are computational limits we need to work within, but we should avoid getting ourselves stuck with inefficient decisions here.

#plurality #computers #programming

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in reply to @artemis's post:

amb @amb8/1/2023, 10:03 AM

identity can be objectively measured in any way
identities do not overlap with other identities
an identity is necessarily a person
an identity is associated with one and only one body

fictive @artemis8/1/2023, 10:04 AM

yup yup yup yup yup

Emily the Flareon @EmilyTheFlareon8/1/2023, 12:43 PM

a body is associated with an identity at all

beeps & Olive @batbeeps8/1/2023, 4:24 PM

There's a pretty neat blog post about the intersection of plurality and how identity is handled in software by Xe which might be interesting, if you've not read it before :>
https://xeiaso.net/blog/identity-model-software-2021-01-31

lilycove @shiny-ralts8/1/2023, 7:40 PM

i've seen some systems asking for it to be increased a second time, up past 2000. the devs always say yes immediately.

linear cannon @linear8/1/2023, 7:52 PM

hm.

gonna go adjust the data structures for the powerpc mac os x misskey client i'm writing so that it can gracefully handle no less than 65536 accounts. probably more (currently it's only 16)

linear cannon @linear8/1/2023, 7:54 PM

and now you've got me thinking about ui adjustments necessary for that

linear cannon @linear8/1/2023, 7:54 PM

this is actually really easy but what i was going to do definitely wouldn't have worked

fictive @artemis8/1/2023, 8:03 PM

hehehe yeah that is the funny thing about it. just, the decisions we make when we're thinking about "a small number" vs "a big number" are very different. Shifting that perspective was my primary goal with that section in the original context too

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