this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Lemmy

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why didn't lemmy community actors get put on a subdomain? (toast.ooo)
submitted 5 months ago by grant@toast.ooo to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml
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always wondered this, but kept forgetting to post it

eg users would be on @grant@toast.ooo and a community would be on @canvas@group.toast.ooo or something like that

then it would still follow the AP spec but still allow for identical identifiers (like a user account being @sc07@toast.ooo and a community also being [!sc07@toast.ooo](/c/sc07@toast.ooo))

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[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 27 points 5 months ago (2 children)

As an instance owner, the amount of overhead to support that would be nuts for me. Each subdomain would have to have DNS routed to it, or a wildcard which isn't the best supported. On top of that I'd need to somehow manage certs in a way where when the software detects a new community it'd have to ask for a new cert and broadcast the new domain to everyone. Then what do you do about communities from other instances on your instance?

What is being done is the right way. We use DNS to tell us different services/hosts. We use the path to tell us a subsection of the same service

[–] jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 5 months ago

TLS certs can have one level of wildcard (even let's encrypt supports this), and creating subdomains programmatically is not exactly black magic - the main blocker from the technical side is that the code to update the DNS is usually not portable between providers, so it's not adequate for a federated open source project.

[–] grant@toast.ooo 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

not every community would have it's own subdomain, no

community actors would just have the hostname part be a different domain eg

users:

  • @UserA@toast.ooo
  • @UserB@toast.ooo

communities:

  • @CommunityA@group.toast.ooo
  • @CommunityB@group.toast.ooo
[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That is how it's done though, the syntax for communities can be searched for with [!community@instance.tld](/c/community@instance.tld). It's just not part of DNS.

[–] grant@toast.ooo 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

but if you search a community up on another fedi platform, it won't always pick the community or the user (if they have the same name)

as far as the other platforms know, there's one actor but points to two different accounts

afaik the webfinger spec doesn't allow for multiple actors having the same identifier, like how lemmy does it (here's what gets returned when a username matches a community and user)

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

And that's why users get @user and communities are !community. I'm not sure what you're asking for tbh, I think the current system works fine, searching could be easier, but I haven't seen anyone confused by the difference there.

Nested DNS is a pain, and not really what it's meant to do, that's why we don't use nested DNS. If you take DNS away as a solution (because it's not really one), then what is currently happening makes a lot of sense.

[–] grant@toast.ooo 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

@user works on all fediverse platforms, but !community does not

i was proposing for this to be a possible solution to make it work across all existing platforms w/o requiring all the other platforms to support lemmy's system

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 6 points 5 months ago

Ohhkay I finally get what you're suggesting now. From something like Mastodon there's no clear way to specify.

Ehh, something to be solved but not a huge deal IMO. I think it'd have to be something custom, as there's no concept on Mastodon like Lemmy's communities, but I still stand by DNS isn't the way to solve it. Mixing it in with a hashtag might be a good way, where if you could "subscribe" to a hashtag over there, like #community@instance.tld, but then we're just talking about syntax. I actually do think there needs to be a standardization on "groups" then across the fediverse, and since Lemmy is the only one I've seen with a group syntax, I'd just suggest we standardize !

[–] CyberSyndicalist@hexbear.net 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

possibly because lemmy instances can themselves be hosted on subdomains

[–] grant@toast.ooo 2 points 5 months ago

how I was thinking about it the instance owners would pick the subdomain the communities would be placed on, everything would still route through the main host but external interactions (like following a community) would be routed through the subdomain

eg for blahaj.zone's lemmy instance it could be setup as users sending in @lemmy.blahaj.zone and communities ending in @group.lemmy.blahaj.zone or something like that

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 points 5 months ago

I dunno about Mastodon, but Pixelfed says they're working on a "groups" feature which should be compatible with Lemmy communities. It'll be interesting to see how they solve this issue—if they do address it at all.

[–] Die4Ever@programming.dev 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That would make community names a bit longer so they'd be more annoying to type and share?

[–] grant@toast.ooo 2 points 5 months ago

if using lemmy, it could automatically make this change

this would primarily be used by other fedi platforms to easily differentiate community & users

eg if i followed @sc07@group.toast.ooo on mastodon it would for sure follow !sc07@toast.ooo and not @sc07@toast.ooo (an account with the same identifier)