I just tried to make a post on Mastodon and tag a community in it so that my post would show up in that community – something I’ve done many times before.
However, in this case, there is a Lemmy user with the same name as the community, and it defaulted to tagging that user. Is there a way to tag the community specifically?
I didn’t even realize that a user could have the same name as a community. I thought every fediverse actor had to have a unique at-name-at-domain handle, and both users and communities were actors.
Agreed… I didn’t respond right away since I wasn’t sure if I was right, but there are two constraints at play here:
You can fault Mastodon for not handling it, but I think the onus is on Lemmy to adjust their behaviour.
For reference, the same constraint happened with NodeBB. When we started, categories didn’t have handles and were not unique with users (so, a category could be named the same as a user). I needed to make the handle unique between both categories and users, for this exact reason.
Regardless of how webfinger is supposed to work, Lemmy has now got a situation where there are many many overlapping actors. I don’t see a clean way out of this for them so it’ll probably persist.
Lucky this came up because I have been meaning to make PieFed work the same as Lemmy, with multiple actors in the webfinger response!
By the time it (unique handles between users and categories) was needed, NodeBB had been around for 10 years and installed in countless places.
It needed to be done in one fell swoop so we coded an upgrade script that prioritized the user slug (as historically it had been around longer).
Hopefully the only thing you really have to federate out is an Update, but who knows what’ll happen.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1922
Unlikely to change. I found a more recent issue that was closed with a link going to that one, so they’ve been over this multiple times over the years and don’t want to budge.
PieFed will continue to disallow communities and feeds to have the same name as users, that will maximize compatibility.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/commit/ddabdc0a3cf30b132fe7c4c05ba155065b7b1f53
I sound like a broken record, but none of this would happen if the devs took a good look at RDF before throwing everything into objects/classes and ORMs.
I’m working on something that aims to be compatible with Lemmy’s API, and my models are based on the context definitions first. This means that it becomes impossible to have communities and users with the preferred_username, because they are both actors.
I also posted this question in another comment thread, but is there no way for an app to say “give me communities only” or “give me users only” when calling the webfinger lookup thingy? Because if there is, then Mastodon devs could update the behavior on their side to depend on whether the name starts with @ or ! (the same way Lemmy apps do).
Nope, it’s just a.single route, no filters or qualifiers I am aware of.
One could go through the returned accounts and see which are users and which are groups, although that’s expensive and time consuming to do.