The Case for @ You

The @ symbol has been used for user@host for over 50 years, and was taken up in popular culture with emails: @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, @msn.com, @juno.com, @gmail.com, etc. Every platform that wanted to give you a name first made sure you understood that the name wasn’t really yours, leading to the dreaded feedback, “sorry, that name is already taken.”

Twitter users adapted @ in 2006–2007 to the mention, @twitter_user. Facebook and the Meta properties (Instagram, Threads) adopted the mention, not to mention @slack and @youtube. But every platform adopting @ expected the string that followed to be a user on that platform.

Now there’s the “AT Protocol” where the @-mention m…

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