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.
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
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?!
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.
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 actorshttps://people.myserver.com/would be the subdomain for the AS2.Person actor