It kind of makes me think of how odd it would have been if many of the old forums named themselves like bookclub.phpbulletin.com, metalheads.vbulletin.net, or something.

There's nothing wrong with doing that, obviously, but it's struck me as another interesting quirk of fediverse instances/sites. Generally as soon as you visit them you can tell by the site interface or an icon somewhere what software they're using.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

but they would easily solve the delegation problem since that's exactly what they were designed for. lol

So much yes. You'd think that'd be the first thing they'd bake in the ActivityPub spec, given it governs how the user handles are handled, they even look like E-Mail addresses. Yet nobody seems to have thought about making the usernames sane. It's the first thing I looked up while setting my Lemmy, can I make the username look less stupid, as I did with Matrix when I set that one up.

There's a weird trend towards stuffing everything as HTTP(S) web APIs and JSON. We're about to get to a point where everything will talk over websockets because we forgot TCP exists.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Ha, one of my biggest pet peeves is developers poorly re-inventing a wheel that already exists as a standard.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

ActivityPub does not govern how user handles work. All AP actors are defined by their IDs (which in Lemmy's case happens to be the URL their profile is hosted in, which is a mistake as you cannot change your username without breaking federation, but at least Lemmy isn't alone, both Mastodon and I think *oma family of software do the same thing)

AFAIK the @username@instance convention is Webfinger's doing, and (to the best of my very incomplete knowledge) the convention of "preferredUsername @ the hostname of the object ID" is a hack Mastodon pulled that got adopted as a de-facto standard (as is quite a lot of other things in AP).