Usernames are a vital part of social media with how people interact with each other - They're how you remember someone, how people know who to mention in a post or reply, and a way to ensure even if people have the same display names that you can identify exactly who you are referring to.
For example, right now with Bettermode if there are two users named Mathew and someone @'s one of the Mathew's (Like this: Mathew Business) in a reply to a post, other users have no way to tell who that person is referring to unless they click on the profile, which most people won't do. Unique usernames come in handy here alongside other reasons so that when you @ someone it's clear who you're referring to. For example, I could @Mathew and then the other example user called @Mathew2 is clearly distinguished from @Mathew.
It would be great to incorporate usernames into Bettermode and to allow users to select a custom @username for themselves that only they can have - So if my username is @Mathew, no one else can use that, that is now my username, unless I change it and then it is open for others to use again. Alongside this, it would be great for the profile URL's to reflect the username, so my profile could be Website.com/Mathew or Website.com/@Mathew - This allows users to easily share their profile link with anyone without having to go onto the platform every time to grab their link as they have to right now since the link is a mix of words and letters and randomly generated.
Lastly, and this isn't as important as the other features are but it would still be great at some point if the rest of this gets implemented, if someone types a username in the search bar and starts their search with "@" then it would be good for the search bar to only include results for the username as they search, not spaces or posts. So if I go to search something and I type "@Mat" it would show anyone's profile who's username starts with "@Mat" but no other content, just the users. This will ensure quick results for users.
I appreciate all the great work team and hope to see this in the platform in the near future 🙏