Not a new phenomenon in human nature or on the Internet, by itself. On some wikis (e.g. en.wikipedia.org) there used to be extensive lists of “notorious vandals”, then people realized that this only encouraged them further, now this is more limited, but there still is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse

ffs stop feeding trolls and spammers

!superbowl@lemmy.world is already a thing, but I’ve said before and am repeating here that this is a lot less funny on a platform where “superbowl” on other instances can still be communities about the Super Bowl than on reddit where there could be only one “superbowl” subreddit

That is basically OpenID which has been around for a long time. In principle there is nothing stopping fediverse instances from being OpenID providers or allowing login with an OpenID, not sure anyone has done this yet though.

I’ve said before and I’ll repeat here again that we really ought to be denying recognition to the person behind those messages, whoever they are.

That said, I remember not long ago reading a comment that somebody had actually seen the person in those images livestream, which wouldn’t be possible if these were just photos of a person who had nothing to do with it.

In my country only the head is really visible on driver’s licenses. I think that was a light-gray polo shirt, but I am no longer 100% sure.

This blogger has previously had some interesting thoughts on the matter. For example https://blenderdumbass.org/articles/Paternalistic_Laws_Make_Very_Little_Sense but I remember some others too, though can’t easily find them now.