We have decided to do it like that, because it is an easy and nice way to have a unique ID that works with or without a custom domain.

For example: `openprotocolfanblog@wordpress.com` makes only sense if you use the wordpress.com subdomain. If you have your own domain, you want to have something like `username@domain` not `username@wordpress.com`.

Besides of that, you will be able to activate user-accounts (next to the blog-account) on higher plans. That means we had to choose something that is consistent but causes no collisions with usernames.

And finally Mastodon and others only show the part before the @, that makes the ID very similar to what Bluesky is doing. https://mastodon.social/@pfefferle/111220452911718192

I respect you and Automattic being transparent about your thinking here on HN.

I assume that would create confusing overlaps with @wordpress.com email addresses which may or may not exist? Maybe just "blog@NAME.wordpress.com" would suffice.

we also thought about using something generic like `blog@NAME.wordpress.com` or `feed@NAME.wordpress.com` but this would have made autocomplete useless. Mastodon users would see a list of thousands of `blog` or `feed` users when searching for a WordPress.com user.

The trouble with that is moderation. Presumably there exists some Nazi who has a Wordpress blog. If they're a particularly noisy Nazi, that could get Wordpress.com banned on a lot of instances, because the Fediverse's primary and easiest moderation route is nuking badly-behaved instances, and many instance admins are _particularly_ sceptical of corporate ones (some instances have _preemptively_ banned threads).

This way, every Wordpress blog is for practical purposes its own instance.

That said, the username component does seem unnecessarily unwieldy.