this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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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. Just the right-to-left nature of scripts like Arabic alone would break UI design. Technically you could hex encode usernames and assume them to be UTF-8, but it'd be a massive pain that'll undoubtedly break compatibility with other services.
You can use your display name to freely enter just about any name. Usernames are almost entirely irrelevant to Lemmy as far as I'm aware; I think they only matter in mentions (although that's a choice as well, on the ActivityPub level there's no need to do that). The display name should cover the "it looks really cool" component. As you've maybe seen already, you can include names, flags, and emoji in there as well!
With the current username system, there are more possible usernames than there are grains of sand on earth, per server. I don't think we need a bigger username pool. We may need a better way to tag people, though, but that's also true without different character sets.
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.
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/😂)Link detection is flaky as hell, especially for special characters. They rarely work reliably. URLs themselves don't contain unicode. They use basic ASCII and anything beyond that needs to be encoded in some form. The link you posted isn't a spec-compliant link, it only works because Lemmy apps and browsers are nice and do the conversion to the real URL for you. According to the spec:
If you use usernames as identifiers (which, again, are optional) like Lemmy does, databases and external entities will use the percentage URLs, not the readable ones. Unicode domains will have their xn-- form stored as well. It's up to apps and browsers to decide those and turn them back into unicode. It's not really relevant what apps and browsers show you when it comes to the technical interoperability of users.
ActivityPub itself has wide support for various languages, including having different names and content for different languages. The username (actually preferredUsername) is transmitted through JSON, which is by definition UTF-8, so most encodings in use today (not that weird Japanese one and that other Asian encoding that's not UTF compatible) will Just Work™ assuming the necessary URL encoding and decoding logic is added in the right places.
I think Lemmy can be patched to accept unicode characters as usernames, as the current limitations in code and in the UI are just choices made during development. I don't think it'll add much, though.
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.
That's only true for platforms that only caters to the English speaking world. The fediverse should be and is much broader than that.
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.
Punycode would work here better I think as it’s plain ASCI with no special characters except a dash if I recall correctly.
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