that post will have been a text post, not a link (those are likely broken now, and certainly were broken a year ago due to a bug in the misskey 12 codebase inherited by firefish and forks. modern versions of misskey just fixed that a couple months ago)

the username thing does not completely break federation, but it will randomly confuse instances. there's a 50/50 chance whether an instance will get the correct user it asks or not, and once an instance resolves a user once it'll have a similar 50/50 chance for each profile update (icon change, sidebar change, etc.). of course, if there's no conflicting user for a community (or vice versa) then federation will be fine.

[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Ah, I see! Thanks for the explanation. I'd go back and check but firefish.social isn't around anymore.

It's really a shame since interoperability is such (theoretical) benefit of ActivityPub, but what can you do.

[–] ShittyKopper@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 months ago

the specs are so open ended that i doubt real interoperability will ever happen. you can break interoperability with basically every other current software out there and still be compliant with the specs