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.
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