this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Lemmy
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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
not every community would have it's own subdomain, no
community actors would just have the hostname part be a different domain eg
users:
@[email protected]@[email protected]communities:
@[email protected]@[email protected]That is how it's done though, the syntax for communities can be searched for with
[[email protected]](/c/[email protected]). 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)
And that's why users get
@userand 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.
@userworks on all fediverse platforms, but!communitydoes noti 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
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
#[email protected], 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!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.