you don't know what pluralkit is
i'm sick of the lack of depth in discussions of plural accessibility and multi-ID features within current chat software discourse. here's the problem: you don't know what pluralkit is.
"they're making pluralkit for [chat platform]" are they, though? do you understand what that is? do you understand why tupperbox isn't pluralkit? do you understand why matrix account switchers aren't pluralkit? do you understand why IRC /nick isn't pluralkit?
here's the deal: multi-identity chat is not a technical capability problem, it's a social integration problem. The question is not "can you send messages from different profiles with this software", it's "how does this software avoid implicitly ostracizing plural systems?" and the answer fucking matters.
what pluralkit teaches us is that when multi-ID messaging is naturalised in the software itself, it stops being exceptional to the user. what matters is not the featureset available to systems, it's that pk/webhook messages look like messages, which means users treat them like messages. the shared design language makes plural expression approachable, comprehensible, even intuitive to people who would otherwise struggle, hell, plural systems who otherwise struggle - we've met so many systems who've known themselves to be plural for a long time, but it took seeing other systems openly using pluralkit to show them that there is a way to integrate their plural identity socially, that there is a space in the world they can make for themselves - and that have subsequently become comfortable and open with themselves in other parts of their lives. that's the kind of impact these accessibility tools have - you don't know what pluralkit is.
the catch is blaring - every piece of technical/social friction in a multi-ID feature others its users and fosters their alienation (e.g. copping "wHy iS tHe bOT tAlKinG" due to the discord BOT label) instead of trivialising their acceptance - these are effectively flashing neon signs that say "THIS ISN'T NORMAL" that you could just never install.
"they're making pluralkit for [chat platform]" do they understand the problem they need to solve? or are they copying the list of features beat-for-beat? the more you speak to plural systems on discord, the more you see how much the the medium both enables and limits us, the more "let's set the bar where it already is" is obviously an absurd fucking take.
the tools we use and their friction shape both what's possible in terms of our expression and actualisation, and what's trivial in terms of our ostracisation. you don't know what pluralkit is.
making individual improvements over pluralkit's frictions is good, but without understanding the right problem to solve, you can easily backslide or leave things incomplete: stoat's masquerade feature (for example) has technical improvements over PK by existing at an API level, but chose a name that sows distrust in openly presenting plural systems - a clear lack of understanding of multi-ID as a social integration issue.
you need to be able to think critically and identify pitfalls like this yourself, but here's my list of flashing neon signs to avoid installing:
Impermanence: treating using different IDs as a "change" [irc /nick notifications]
Scoping: removing user agency [tupper perms, bot invites, matrix per-id bans]
Armbanding: displaying multi-id messages unnaturally [BOT/APP labels, different formatting to other messages sent by users]
Opaqueness: missing flows that make multi-id messaging seem edge case or "unsupported" [pk unviewable profiles, usage being confined to a bot or mod]
Complexity: time spent on any action scaling with ID count [matrix room joins getting you IP banned, anything without proxy tag parsing]
Serversidedness: not giving the chat client control over the ID to send a message with [pk deletion jitter, no avatar preview (leading to misproxies)]
multi-ID isn't something you can just "tack on" - remember, in an ideal chat software, ALL messages/accounts would be multi-ID (i.e truly natural messages) - with most users just never setting up a second ID.
so, use the accessibility tools you design - and talk to the people who've used them more than you. and remember: stagnation is not good enough - we deserve better.
tangentwithtanner
areudirty
romaincrisis
germansingergirl
dededos
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