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.

  • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    In webfinger, the sidecar protocol we use to look up actors, lemmy does distinguish between community and user actors. Mastodon needs to up their game.

    • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      I am not so sure Mastodon is at fault, here. Going to https://lemmy.world/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct%3Avinyl%40lemmy.world, this is the result:

      {
  "subject": "acct:vinyl@lemmy.world",
  "links": [
    {
      "rel": "http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page",
      "type": "text/html",
      "href": "https://lemmy.world/u/vinyl",
      "template": null
    },
    {
      "rel": "self",
      "type": "application/activity+json",
      "href": "https://lemmy.world/u/vinyl",
      "template": null,
      "properties": {
        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#type": "Person"
      }
    },
    {
      "rel": "http://ostatus.org/schema/1.0/subscribe",
      "type": null,
      "href": null,
      "template": "https://lemmy.world/activitypub/externalInteraction?uri=%7Buri%7D"
    },
    {
      "rel": "http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page",
      "type": "text/html",
      "href": "https://lemmy.world/c/vinyl",
      "template": null
    },
    {
      "rel": "self",
      "type": "application/activity+json",
      "href": "https://lemmy.world/c/vinyl",
      "template": null,
      "properties": {
        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#type": "Group"
      }
    }
  ]
}

      So, lemmy is just providing two different actors for the same subject name and saying they refer to the same account.

      • julian@activitypub.space
        1·
        10 months 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.