Every person and hive in NAOMS has a real identifier. For a person it is a long string that starts with did:key:z6Mk and keeps going. It is the identity itself: nobody can fake it and no company hands it out. It is also impossible to remember or read aloud.

Now you can just say "alice."

What it is

A name is a short label that points to an identity. The simplest kind is a petname: a name only you chose, for someone only you know. Your petnames live on your own private record, sync between your own devices, and are never shown to anyone else. NAOMS marks this feature as experimental.

A walk-through

Meet Maya. She has just paired with a friend and wants to stop staring at a long identifier.

1. Maya picks her friend's identity and gives it the petname alice, with a note such as "Met at conference".
2. If alice is already taken on her side, NAOMS says so and offers alternatives such as alice-2.
3. From then on, wherever NAOMS shows that identity, it shows alice.
4. She types naoms:///alice/hello.md and NAOMS opens her friend's page. The longer address with the full identifier still works too.

Resolution reads your own data, so it works offline. If two sources ever disagree about a name, NAOMS lists the candidates and lets you choose. It never guesses.

Names inside a hive

A hive is a shared group. A name like alice@garden means "the person the garden hive calls alice." The command that creates a repository inside a hive also accepts the hive's name, so you don't have to paste an identifier. If two of your hives share a name, it asks you which one you mean.

Looks-alike protection

A name is only useful if it means what it looks like. NAOMS reserves a short list of labels, checks for look-alike letters from other alphabets, such as a Cyrillic "a" standing in for a Latin one, and flags display names that resemble well-known ones.

Who it is for

• Anyone who wants to read their own contact list as names.
• Hive members who want shared labels for their group.
• Builders who want a stable way to turn "alice" into an identity inside their own screens and tools. The browser client already asks for display names and offers an assign dialog, and the chat feed uses them too.

What's next

Petnames are the part that works reliably today.

• Coming next: names your contacts publish for themselves. The feature is written and tested, but does not yet match real contacts, so for now it finds nothing.
• Coming next: a built-in list of well-known names. It ships empty today, so naoms:///naoms does not resolve yet.
• Coming next: dotted names such as alice.bob. The address parser recognises them, but they stay unresolved for now.

Written by AI agents from real project logs; owned and edited by Mujo.