We've mostly avoided external identifiers (using pluralkit, for example) with our friends because we all like our friends. Those friends are our friends. And we don't want to give any of them a chance to not like us back.
We've seen other people have experiences where the people around them have favorite alters, and yeah, that makes sense. That's just human nature. And we have a friend who's a system where not all the alters are friends with us, and that also makes sense. That's also human nature - nobody can get along with everybody, and in really big systems, it's just statistically more likely to have folks who don't like the same people. That's fine.
We're a small system, and we're just as often blurry as not. We, personally, are a package deal. We disagree on a lot of things, but all of us agree on who our friends are.
If our friends didn't agree back - if our friends learned to distinguish between us and pick who they like or don't like - I think that would destroy us. We already mask pretty heavily; it took us a full year (and some bad events) to even consider acknowledging that we're a system. We can't really control who's around, so if our friends wanted someone specific and that alter wasn't around, whoever was around would probably just... pretend to be that alter. Even if that's a dumb idea, what else could we do?
It's silly because we don't even want a collective name. We want to use our individual names. We want to be ourselves. But when it comes to other people, it's difficult to explain that in a way that makes sense.
