Use showApubName in comment and post listings

[lionirdeadman]

Description

This helps distinguish people from other instances which use a Display name and can help prevent impersonations which we've seen in the past.

Fixes #1974

Screenshots

Before

After

[dessalines]

Very much against this. Bloating the username lengths massively everywhere. The lack of a @ tells you that its a display name, and that if you want to see the actual identifier, you can either click and hold, or go to their profile page.

[lionirdeadman]

Then there is no way to differentiate from a local user and someone who is outside of the instance.

Now, if you want to propose Displayname@instance then it causes another problem because it can be made to look like someone else's user@instance.

I will note that other federated services like Mastodon, Firefish do show both:

[creesch]

The lack of a @ tells you that its a display name.

It no longer makes it clear if a user is from your own instance or from a different instance.

Not to mention, the lack of @ is a really easy to overlook and not some established UI/UX paradigm people will easily pick up on.

[SleeplessOne1917]

I'm with @lionirdeadman and @creesch on this one. The "@" and instance name will not show up when a display name is set regardless of whether a user is on the same instance as you or a different one.

[dessalines]

Having really long names is terrible for mobile. Having display names like this: , or even just A pretty long display name@instance.TLD will cause a ton of line-wraps and noise on mobile.

It no longer makes it clear if a user is from your own instance or from a different instance.

You can easily click-and-hold. I followed matrix, which is to stay mobile-friendly, and have the display name being an actual display name. If people want to know your specific instance, and full identifier, they can click and hold, or go to your profile page.

I tested fully qualified names on mobile before both in lemmy-ui, and jerboa, and they cause a ton of incredibly ugly line wraps.

[lionirdeadman]

Comparing a chat app and a forum app is not really a fair comparison because for a chat app, the members in the room are a lot less likely to use the same display name.

That said, if two people have the same display name on matrix - here's how that looks :

Unless we can somehow know if two people have the same display name and act accordingly, it seems best to simply do it.

[SleeplessOne1917]

We could also do an approach similar to the Mastodon screenshot and display the apub info on a separate line under the display name in a less prominent color. That could make apub names easier to see while also avoiding overlong lines and line wraps.

[ruffsl]

We could also do an approach similar to the Mastodon screenshot and display the apub info on a separate line under the display name in a less prominent color.

This could give more room in the future for things like user flares as well, like when a user is flared as verified domain expert in a Q&A community, or marked as frequent contributer. If these multiple line could match the height of the avatar icons, then it might not be too bulky, while still leaving space for other info later.

[creesch]

You can easily click-and-hold.

People will not do that if there is no obvious reason to do so. It therefore can lead to confusing situations at the very least but escalate to people actively abusing it to impersonate other users on an instance.

I tested fully qualified names on mobile before both in lemmy-ui, and jerboa, and they cause a ton of incredibly ugly line wraps.

Isn't that simply deciding that form is more important than function? Something that might even be addressable, one proposal, has already been done. There might be other things as well that improve the "prettiness" of it all.
But, in the meantime really just flips a boolean for something that is already implemented.

In addition to this, this change already has been implemented in beehaw.org for almost a week. In that time I haven't seen any support posts about it or confusion about it in support chat on either matrix or discord. So, to me, that indicates that it might not be as big of a dealbreaker.

Wouldn't it make sense to then simply merge this PR now and then address the exact looks that need to be adjusted in a future change?

[makotech222]

Just noting that for hexbear, upon federation we almost immediately changed the frontend to display 'display_name@domain' to aid in moderation efforts and to make it clear if someone is outside our instance. It would be shorter than 'display_name (username@domain)' so that might be better for upstream.

Also, for hexbear users ourside our domain, we have almost 100% of our users using display_name because we use it to force pronouns on username. So our domain name ends up not showing up anywhere.

[dessalines]

I'll go back against what I said previously, and am willing to use the larger apub name. But it needs some testing and before / after pics, because its going to cause a ton of wrapping on mobile.

[lionirdeadman]

I already put the before/after pics. We've been using it on Beehaw ever since this PR was made. I've not noted any complaints about it.

I agree with @SleeplessOne1917's design with adding height to names to show this information rather than width but I honestly have no web dev knowledge so I wouldn't be able to deliver on that.

[dessalines]

Closed in favor of #2064