For the complete documentation index, see llms.txt. The full corpus is available at llms-full.txt. This page is also available as Markdown by appending
.mdto the URL.
Disavowals
A disavowal is the inverse of a claim: a signed statement that an account is not you, or that you are not on a platform at all. It sits in the same signed manifest as everything else, so it carries the same weight as the accounts you claim.
Two kinds
Section titled “Two kinds”This account is not me. Names one specific profile, by handle or by link. Use it for a known impersonator, or for a same-name person who is not doing anything wrong but keeps getting mistaken for you.
I am not on this platform. Declares that you have no account there at all, which makes every account on that platform claiming to be you fake by definition. Stronger than listing impersonators one at a time, and it does not go stale as new ones appear.
What you can say
Section titled “What you can say”A disavowal needs a platform. An account disavowal also needs a handle or a link, because a statement that does not say which account is not a statement about anything. A short note is optional, and it is the part that does the work for a reader: “known impersonator”, or “same name, different person”.
Order matters. The list is shown in the order you set, so put the one people keep falling for at the top.
Publish for it to count
Section titled “Publish for it to count”The statement lands on realhandles.com immediately and enters your signed proof when you publish and re-sign. Until then, anyone verifying you independently sees the previous version with no disavowal in it. See The signed manifest.
Editing or removing one changes what you publish from now on. Versions you already signed keep what they said, because the history is append-only, and that is what makes editing an old version impossible for us as well as for you.
Reporting somebody else’s impersonator
Section titled “Reporting somebody else’s impersonator”Disavowals are what you say about accounts elsewhere. Reporting is what anybody says about a RealHandles profile, and it needs no account at all, because the person being impersonated usually does not have one. A human reads reports.
This is the one thing in the product you do about someone else, so it is deliberately kept off the signed manifest. Your key says what is yours and what is not yours. It does not adjudicate other people.
What it looks like
Section titled “What it looks like”
A disavowal is signed into the manifest exactly like a verified account, so it carries the same weight as the rest of the identity rather than being a note on the side.
In the Android app
Section titled “In the Android app”Disavowals get a section of their own: Identity > Disavow.
Adding one asks the same first question the website does, as two choices at the top of the form: One account, which names a single profile by handle or link, or A whole platform, which says you have no account there at all. Everything after that is the platform, the handle or link, and the optional note that does the real work for a reader.
Published statements reorder with the same arrows and jump-to-position control as accounts, and the order you set is the order the manifest publishes, so the impersonator people keep falling for goes at the top.
Correcting one that is already published is on the row itself, under Options. What a statement covers cannot be edited there: a disavowal of one account never becomes a disavowal of the whole platform by an edit, because those are different statements. Remove the old one and add the one you meant.
Reporting somebody else’s impersonator is deliberately somewhere else in the app, under Identity > Data, and needs no identity of your own.