Benjamin Franklin's Alter Egos Gave Him the Most Freedom (smithsonianmag.com)

One thing I like about bluesky is how easy it makes switching alts - you just click your avatar. You can have one for professional and one for politics, etc.

Some sites like reddit makes this such a pain, unless you use old reddit with browser extensions.

alts are underrated

i know some very very interesting people whose x is anon

When Benjamin Franklin launched Poor Richard’s Almanack in 1733 under the fake identity of “Richard Saunders,” he needed a way to get attention in Philadelphia’s crowded almanac market. So he decided to kill off one of his established competitors.

Franklin announced that Titan Leeds would soon die: “He dies, by my Calculation... on Oct. 17. 1733. 3 ho. 29 m. P.M.”

Leeds, inconveniently, did not die.

Instead, he published another almanac and attacked Poor Richard as a “false Predicter,” an “Ignorant,” a “conceited Scribler,” a “Fool, and a Lyar.”

Franklin responded that there was “the strongest Probability that my dear Friend is no more,” because the real Leeds was far too well bred to say such awful things about his friend Richard Saunders. Therefore somebody must simply be publishing an almanac under the dead man’s name.

The next year Franklin stopped even pretending there was much doubt. He complained about receiving abuse from “the Ghost of Titan Leeds, who pretends to be still living.”

And then he actually tried to prove Leeds was dead from Leeds’ own words, concluding: “he is dead now, to all Intents and Purposes, any thing he may say to the contrary notwithstanding.”

This went on for years.

Then, in 1738, Titan Leeds actually died.

At this point Franklin could have admitted that perhaps predicting a man’s death five years early represented a minor error in his astrological calculations.

Instead, Franklin escalated.

In the 1740 Poor Richard’s Almanack he claimed that Leeds’ ghost had appeared and left him a letter. The now genuinely dead Leeds supposedly wrote: “I did actually die at that time,” explaining that Poor Richard’s original prediction had been off by only “5 min. 53 sec.”