If a Lemmy user has the same name as a community, how can I tag the community on Mastodon?
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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 users only" when calling the webfinger lookup thingy? Because if there is, then Mastodon devs could update the behavior on their side to depend on whether the name starts with @ or ! (the same way Lemmy apps do).
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.
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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
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.
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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
This would make instance creation too complicated.
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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?!
Because users and communities are completely separate, and stored in different DB tables. So there is no good way to enforce uniqueness.
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It could be an optional feature.
By default, users and communities share the namespace so they can not have the same name. But if you as an admin want to let users and communities with the same handle (the "as:preferredUsername"), then you need to add two CNAMEs that point to the same domain of the backend, and add these to lemmy.hjson, so that the backend can know how to generate actor ids.
Of course, this still wouldn't let mastodon users to find the actors by querying "username@myserver", but at least they would be able to know they can find "@username@people.myserver" and @username@groups.myserver".
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https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1922
Unlikely to change. I found a more recent issue that was closed with a link going to that one, so they've been over this multiple times over the years and don't want to budge.
PieFed will continue to disallow communities and feeds to have the same name as users, that will maximize compatibility.
