I just HAVE to share this silly story somewhere, and this seems like the most reasonable place. The Fediverse is absolutely wild lol, and exploring how the platforms interact is one of my very favorite parts of it.

So, I use the Fediverse’s book review platform (BookWyrm) for all my book tracking stuff. Recently I started reading a book, whose author I knew to be a Lemmy user. Obviously I tried to tag them in the status when I marked the book as “currently reading”; why wouldn’t you, right? At the time I had no idea A) whether you could tag people in a BookWyrm book status update, or B) whether it was interoperable enough with Lemmy to federate there. I clicked post, and the “@” never became a hyperlink so I assumed it had failed somehow or other. No big deal.

The next day, I get a comment on that status, from a Lemmy user. Not the tagged author, not even on the same instance as the tagged author! I’m like, ok, are Lemmy users following my BookWyrm account? Can they even? Did my tag work afterall and just wound up at the wrong person somehow? But no, not exactly…

What happened was, the author I tagged ran a community under the exact same name on the same instance. Within Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed/etc that just works I guess, because they’re differentiated by using “!” vs “@”. But anyone who’s tagged a community from outside Lemmy knows you use “@” there. So, long story short, I accidentally let the author’s entire fanbase know I started reading their book.