Fediverse

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founded 1 year ago

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Request to lemmy: can you please allow non-latin letters as well (self.fediverse)

submitted 2 months ago by Live_Let_Live to c/fediverse

26 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I wish it was allowed to have persian letter usernames maybe even symbols as usernames it looks really cool and increases the username pool as well.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

ActivityPub users need to be identified by some identifier in the URL, and Lemmy chose the user name to be that identifier. As a result, non-Latin usernames become… complicated.

Sorry but this is just false. URIs can easily encode UTF-8 characters and it's perfectly standard to do so via percent-encoding. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/😂. Your browser will even automatically convert that 😂 into the appropriate percent-encoding and will even display the emoji in the address bar, even if that is not the "true" URI.

This is, if you ask me, an unnecessary limitation in Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

Link is detected without the emoji in my app. You might wanna hardcode the link as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/😂
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/😂](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/😂)

[–] Asudox 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Using ASCII in URLs is simple and is less error prone than "supporting" unicode via percent encoding. It is also just a convention to use ASCII for usernames in many platforms. ASCII is also supported out of the box in major OSes while some unicode characters might not. What about impersonation? And what about people trying to type in the username of someone that uses unicode? It is not logical to use unicode in this case.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It is also just a convention to use ASCII for usernames in many platforms.

That's only true for platforms that only caters to the English speaking world. The fediverse should be and is much broader than that.

ASCII is also supported out of the box in major OSes while some unicode characters might not.

What? There is no major OS that does not support Unicode out of the box.

Percent encoding is perfectly fine and users won't even see it.

Also please stop down voting twice with your alt accounts, that's not cool.

[–] sznowicki 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Punycode would work here better I think as it’s plain ASCI with no special characters except a dash if I recall correctly.

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

Punycode is not solving the same problem. Punycode solves Unicode in domain names. Percent encoding is for Unicode in URL paths. Lemmy only needs to worry about the paths, Punycode should be "supported" out of the box without any special handling