@cwebber I've read a bit (to be exact, the RWoT 2018 entry) about Petnames and enthusiastically tried to sell the idea to a friend, who then promptly went ahead and pointed out a in hindsight rather glaring problem: what if the name is in itself not public information depending on the social context, and people from these contexts overlap (which is a common occurence now with social media)?
I think a petname system would make it very easy to accidentally "spill the beans" on some detail.
Imagine for example someone storing their SO as "Alice 😍" and publishing that information to their immediate friend circle, where it propagates out to "friends of friends of friends" at some point shows up as an edge name suggestion for a person that the original person might not even know. Similar problems could emerge with e.g. trans people using a new name with a group of contacts and their birth name with another. Is there a possible approach to prevent facilitating these leaks?