I believe it's more confusing to less technically inclined people though, since @ is used when adressing a server in a community as well.

So I'm afraid it's something that will hinder adoption. The advantage of the ~ strategy is that it feels more like something like email, as well as having the whole unix homage.

I think a massive difference between Twitter and Reddit is that Reddit isn't very user-centric. It's not about building a "personal brand" or amassing individual followings.

That's why I believe a decentralized Reddit clone (akin to Lemmy) has a much larger chance of thriving.

I understand that, but I believe duplicating the @ in a username is confusing. With ~ we could have #topic, !community, ~user and @server

Thank you so much for this! We just set up an instance as well, and we're going to play around with it more the next couple of days.