6mo ago

what happens when user and community have the same name

From mastodon to follow an account or a community on lemmy you use the @name@server format and there is no difference between a community name and a user-name

so i was wondering if anyone tried and checked what happened

24 comments

On Lemmy? Nothing, works fine. On Mastodon? Not sure, maybe someone in a Mastodon community would know.
- They would be identified by their instance. You can't have two identical usernames in the same instance. So you won't have John@mastodon.social twice. Buy you could have John@mastodon.social and John@mastodon.world, for example.
  
  That's not the question though. The question is what if I make a user called "@Lemmy@lemmy.ml" (i.e. this community)? That's probably allowed on Lemmy, but since Mastodon doesn't have the concept of communities in nearly the same way, what would happen?
What should happen: The backend checks if you're trying to create a community that has the same name as a user, or vice versa, and refuses to do it because that would be confusing, since a lot of ways of referring to an entity on Lemmy use the exact same format for the user and the community.
What does happen: Have fun with confusing!
- Inside the Lemmyverse and its API, it’s not confusing at all. Outside of the Lemmyverse there be dragons.
  
  I made an SMTP server that treats email addresses as case sensitive. When it gets mail for Philip@ponder.cat, it refuses to deliver it to philip@ponder.cat, and it allows users to create himbo@ponder.cat and Himbo@ponder.cat as two distinct addresses. Within my server, it's not confusing at all. Outside of my server, there be dragons.
  
  Just wanted to let you know: I was trying to resubscribe to !world@lemmy.world so I could say something. I went to the search box, typed "world@lemmy.world", got a bunch of results including world@lemmy.world at the end, clicked on it, but it was the user @world@lemmy.world, not the community. I couldn't find the community in the list.
  It's no kind of difficulty to work around the problem, of course. But it was a clear instance of me wanting the software to do something, the software messing up because it's allowing multiple entities with the same identifier to exist, and me having to go back and try another way. It actually couldn't find the community when I limited the search to communities, either, and I had to type the URL. No idea what that's about. But yes, it's a cause of minor malfunctions like this.
- What formats are the same? Users are /u and @ while communities are /c and !. No overlap to check for. Mastodon is where the confusion comes in.
We can try it out since there is both @lemmy@lemmy.ml and !lemmy@lemmy.ml
When I searched for lemmy@lemmy.ml on Mastodon (specifically masto.ai), I got the community, not the user. Not sure why, but that's what I got.

24 comments