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.

  • Die4Ever@retrolemmy.comEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    What if the community was the first entry in the results instead of the user? Maybe that’s more appropriate and might cause Mastodon to default to the community when there’s a conflict

    • Nutomic@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      55 minutes ago

      Its intentionally in this order because Mastodon prioritizes the last item (ie the community). If the order was changed, it would be impossible for Mastodon users to interact with a community where a user with the same name exists.

    • Raphael@communick.newsEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      That might work, but it’s never a good idea to write your code against a specific implementation. Plus, it seems that in this case the Lemmy devs shot themselves in the foot: why allow to create two different types of actors with the same name?!

      • Die4Ever@retrolemmy.comEnglish
        21·
        2 days ago

        I agree. Users shouldn’t be allowed to choose a name that already exists as a community. But it would be a shame if communities could not be created because a user with that name already exists.

        • Raphael@communick.newsEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          I think this is yet-another reason to have a separation between users and communities at the instance/domain level.

          Setting up a server should require one top-level domain and two subdomains:

          • https://myserver.com/ would be for webfinger and the actual backend.
          • https://groups.myserver.com/ would be the subdomain for the AS2.Group actors
          • https://people.myserver.com/ would be the subdomain for the AS2.Person actor
            • Raphael@communick.newsEnglish
              1·
              6 minutes ago

              It could be an optional feature.

              By default, users and communities share the namespace so they can not have the same name. But if you as an admin want to let users and communities with the same handle (the “as:preferredUsername”), then you need to add two CNAMEs that point to the same domain of the backend, and add these to lemmy.hjson, so that the backend can know how to generate actor ids.

              Of course, this still wouldn’t let mastodon users to find the actors by querying “username@myserver”, but at least they would be able to know they can find “@username@people.myserver” and @username@groups.myserver".