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writefreely / writefreely

A clean, Markdown-based publishing platform made for writers. Write together and build a community.
https://writefreely.org
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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changing username weirdly affects federation #226

Closed wakest closed 4 years ago

wakest commented 4 years ago

I just noticed that you can change your username on writefreely and thought that was quite strange since its the first software I have noticed in the fediverse that has this ability. If I am following a writefreely account from mastodon and I change my username, I am not automatically following the new username, and I am still following the old one. so if I change my username 10 times I can separately follow 10 different accounts. I am unsure of all the repercussions of this but I can think of many. I think at the very least there should be a warning that changing the username is not recommended due to some incompatibilities or issues with federation between other parts of the fediverse.

was playing with the new instance https://scream.today (running writefreely v0.11.2)

thebaer commented 4 years ago

Hey, thanks for bringing this up! Yeah, we've always let people change their username, from before we added ActivityPub support. In my experience, it's pretty important for usability, so I wouldn't want to remove that feature. But I think your suggestion of adding a warning would be great -- whether that's in the app or just in the documentation.

Otherwise we'll need other fediverse platforms to agree on how they follow changed usernames. That could be 301 redirects on our end, as suggested in this SocialHub thread, or maybe something else.

For the WriteFreely side, let's continue this discussion on this Discuss thread and on SocialHub. I'll close this issue now since it's more of a feature request than a bug.