Make Discriminators Optional on Self-Hosted Instances

[Enverex]

There's not really any reason for them to exist on smaller platforms such as self-hosted instances, they just complicate people's usernames without any real benefit (something I personally really hate, because it feels like I don't even own my own username at that point).

It would be nice to be able to globally turn off discriminators on self-hosted instances to cut down on name cruft and to stop having to have the "Oh, I know my username, but not the numbers bit" conversation for the 50th time after users try and add each other as friends but can't remember the random numbers that they've been assigned as a discriminator.

[JLUsr]

A possible solution for this might be reconfiguring the way user ID's are handled all-together. Rather than always expecting a discriminator, set it so that self-hosters can manually define suffixes/prefixes for the way usernames are handled? This way self-hosted instance could make their own choice, some examples of what you might see self-hosters doing could be as listed.

• Username (no suffix/prefix)
• @Username (an @ prefix; or, whatever kind of prefix you want, maybe even a discriminator prefix)
• Username#XX (a two digit, rather than four, # discriminator suffix, really just whatever the self-hoster decides to set)

I do have some concerns about this. There is a lot of talk about federation and something like this would possible need to see users defining the network they want to find users on separate from the username, or a system to generate shareable friend request URLs that auto-fill that info. You can't exactly verbally say such a URL so it still brings up the whole "I know my username, but I don't remember the networks FQDN." I know there are many people out there using domains that aren't exactly easy to remember.

None of that would be a problem if everyone you are communicating with is within the same self-hosted instance and you are unconcerned with federation though. I do think it is important to note that if federation is adopted, one way or another, the self-hosted instances will obviously see some changes that might require some compatibility work. I really like this idea; but, I struggle coming up with possible ways to make it work (smoothly) in such a scenario.

[MyriaBailey]

I worry that if you have too many options, then people will struggle to remember which instance uses which style, which doesn't really help much either.

Instead, I think the option for users to change their own discriminator could be a neat possible solution. If your username is fairly unique, then it can be whatever easy-to-remember number that you want, like 5555 or 9999, and in the case of federated user bases running into conflicts, the numbers could be randomized again with the user notified of the conflict, so they can change it to a different number that's still free.

If true uniqueness is a concern, there could maybe even be some special numbers (0001?) only available if absolutely no one else has that username at time of selection, or if you're the oldest user of that username. That way you could have a special lil treat for being the "first" or "only" of that username, and it's still easy to remember.