this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
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Why did channels use #?
Why do email addresses use @?
Because.
A hashtag fits more for communities than an exclamation mark.
I think it has more to do with the federated nature of the platform. If you are ingesting content from Mastodon for example, # is a hashtag in a post, and you can tag someone with their username with the @ symbol.
Edit: you can tag people here with @ too - such as @knova@knova@dartboard.social
So that leaves a new symbol for community linking
I'm on kbin, and to sub to a community on a lemmy instance, I have to replace the ! with a @, because that's the actual underlying name, it seems. It's a bit confusing.