I use the picture everywhere as my avatar, together with this nickname. It makes it easy to find me on different platforms and to recognize me.
this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Now that you mention it, I do recognize you from GitHub. I hope Blorp is working out for you!
Haha yes, even Timmy related, I did it and it worked well with my one person PieFed instance :)
It's just what I've always done...
I don't want to be lured into a false sense of anonymity. It's pretty easy to find a person if they post enough. Plus I'm using my own instance, which makes it trivial to find me.
On top of that it's a remnant from my Usenet days. In Germany it was expected to use your real name. Actually strange, considering Germany's hacker culture and strict sense of privacy.
I never use my picture or real name for anything. I don't have social media, so it's not that crazy.
But for no reason at all, i do it on steam. The only platform where no one uses their name and picture.
Well I didn't, but this handle (or variations of it) and I go back maybe 20-25 years, including owning a domain
I think my name and location is fairly easy to find
I bet its for the babes
I sure am turned on by those floppy drivers in your profile pic, big boy
I'll try to give the shorter version of my long-ass answer to this question.
When I first went online and got involved with the hacker community, the queer community, and other subcultural stuff as a kid in the 1990s - first on BBSes, then online services like CompuServe and AOL, and eventually the real Internet via Usenet, email lists, and web forum type things - it definitely was not the thing to do to use your "real" name and identity. So I did that for a while under made-up screennames, and eventually settled upon the screenname you see me using here.
Eventually around the turn of the millennium, as I grew up and the communities I'd flourished in online became a more and more important part of my life, I got tired of trying to lead the double-life thing. I was always conditioned to worry about what would happen if the people at my day job, my family, etc. in "real life" found out about the "me" I was online, but the more I settled into my adult self the more I realized that online me was the me I enjoyed being and I didn't want to have to hide it. I never had much of a taste for living in closets.
Not to get all overdramatic or invite direct comparisons, but I'd found myself thinking about how in the Batman universe the Batman identity was described as the man being his true self while the playboy Bruce Wayne identity was the fake persona he put on to hide behind. I got tired of having to fabricate my own Bruce Wayne.
I'd stopped being camera-shy online or at hacker events, and began sharing my face photos in a time when it was not expected for everyone on social media to do so. I registered the domain of my more mundane non-screenname name, and put my personal site in all my online profiles. I began incorporating online work I'd done under my screenname in my resumes, figuring it was time to find myself work, friends, and "real life" surroundings that would appreciate the things I enjoy doing instead of freaking out when they found out about them.
It's all worked out pretty nicely for me. My real-life family, friends, and colleagues appreciate who I am, people interested in work I do can easily connect, and I don't have to worry about it all falling apart because the wrong person learns something about me. I like sharing who I am. I'm also in a very happy marriage with someone who met me on a dating app where I used this same screenname connected with both my online and real-life weirdness, and she appreciates all the different chunks of my life.
So, when it came time to ditch Reddit and check out Lemmy, I continued to use the same screenname and userpic I use everywhere else, and you can still click my profile and find both my online and real-life info. There was no compelling reason for me not to do that.
I ain't skeered.
What have I got to hide?
Wrong question. It's "Who would I need to hide from?"
anyone scary enough to be worth hiding from would also have the means to tear through the thin paper walls of pseudonymity
Untrue. There are plenty of people who don't have the means to break pseudonymity but who would gladly torment, abuse or seek retribution for some real or imagined slight from someone they can easily identify by face and name.
And it's always worth making the truly scary ones work for it, because they're far more likely to go for easier marks first.
Note that the same logic applies to locking your doors at home. You don't leave your doors unlocked, right?
100% this. Leaving your door unlocked does not assure that you will be attacked or robbed in the night, but it certainly makes it easier for anyone that would like to do that stuff. And there are certainly people out there who would like to do those things and much, much worse, just looking for the right target or oppurtunity to indulge.
Why make it easy for them? Dahmer and Gein both thrived on people giving them the benefit of the doubt. They used the normalcy bias of civil society to their advantage and they are far from the only people willing to take advantage of the naive and the unguarded. If you dont have to roll the die, then why throw em at all? Lock your door not because someone is for sure coming tonight, but because someone could come on any given night, right?
I want everyone to know how magnificent I am