Comment on If a Lemmy user has the same name as a community, how can I tag the community on Mastodon?

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  "subject": "acct:vinyl@lemmy.world",
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      "rel": "http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page",
      "type": "text/html",
      "href": "https://lemmy.world/u/vinyl",
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      "properties": {
        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#type": "Person"
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      "type": null,
      "href": null,
      "template": "https://lemmy.world/activitypub/externalInteraction?uri=%7Buri%7D"
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      "href": "https://lemmy.world/c/vinyl",
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      "href": "https://lemmy.world/c/vinyl",
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• julian@activitypub.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Agreed... I didn't respond right away since I wasn't sure if I was right, but there are two constraints at play here:

  • Lemmy wants to allow communities to be named the same as a user
  • This is not allowed in webfinger (insomuch that multiple IDs reports should refer to the same entity)

  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.

  source

  • rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    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.

    source
  • yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    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 the users only” when calling the webfinger lookup thingy?

    source

    • julian@activitypub.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      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.

      source
• Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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

  source

  • nutomic@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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.

    source
  • rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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?!

    source

    • Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

      source

      • rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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

        source

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