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Story how I found out that Lemmy community paths are bit problematic (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/fediverse

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I found from hard way that lemmy community urls are bit problematic. Here is the story, which contains bit NSFW material.

I was trying to figure out in Jerboa how to subscribe to community in another instance. First one that I came across, that i was not subscribed to was !hairypussy@pornlemmy. com. (I know, I know, I am a perv)

I copy pasted the community path to my android clipboard, and tried few ways in the app, and eventually gave up.

Some time passes, until I went to do some shopping. My wife and I use a shared shopping list. From this shopping list I found this beatiful community path.

My wife had a laugh, but I was worried that If she would have been bit more jelous side, she could have made a assumption from the structure of the path.

The thing is that !hairypussy @ pornlemmy. com looks like email address. This could have been misunderstood quuuite badly.

I am a coder also, so @ is sensible separator, and serves the same purpose as in email. Probably it should not change, but the structure can cause misunderstandings with some communities and lemmy instance urls. Of course here main issue is user error, and any link to some bad site can be issue, but people understand what website URL is.

Please let me know if this needs NSFW tag.

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[–] tarjeezy 48 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I found it amusing when, in response to an issue, the admin asked someone to open a ticket by sending it to [email protected]. At first I thought he meant to DM the account, but then I was like Ohhh, you mean actually send an e-mail to that address. I can totally see people confusing the two concepts.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's true, and in addition it could even be confusing whether [email protected] refers to a community or a user!

I think for ideal clarity using [email protected] and @[email protected] would be best to differentiate from e-mail addresses. Though that would tag users for mention notifications more often I guess.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel like it should be community#instance.domain. The @ is already internet common for email addresses. It should be avoided to reference communities.

[–] amanaftermidnight 3 points 1 year ago

Sadly # is reserved URL particle for page anchors i.e. to refer to an HTML element by its ID.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I would maybe say that c/[email protected] and u/[email protected] could be better. / is not legal character on email address, but so is of course ! in the front. c/ and u/ would make sense because that is the actual url that is fetched (c/[email protected] is located in https://instance.com/c/community), so in code just combining these two paths together would generate the actual URL. Also external communities are handled by https://homeinstance/c/[email protected], so it would make sense here also, because c/ is already part of the path.

Of course changing it at this point in time of the life cycle is probably a no-go.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sure about that "not a legal email character" part?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Local-part

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Ok, it seems that I was wrong, standard seems to allow it. So both ! and / are allowed in email

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]

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

but these solutions would not have saved my clumsy ass in the original case.

If instance would have been fictional furryporn.com and community is called worldnews, and I sent to my grandmother a message containing community url [email protected], it would not really matter is it in form of c/[email protected] or with !