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)
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
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.
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
That is how it’s done though, the syntax for communities can be searched for with !community@instance.tld. It’s just not part of DNS.
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)
possibly because lemmy instances can themselves be hosted on subdomains
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 .blahaj.zone and communities ending in @group.lemmy.blahaj.zone or something like that
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.
That would make community names a bit longer so they’d be more annoying to type and share?
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)
