Punch nazis, trebuchet TERFs.
I am building Voyager, a client for lemmy!
To be completely honest, if you want a healthy 3rd party app ecosystem, the official UI and backend need to be completely separated with a publicly documented API.
Biggest win with Lemmy, and biggest fluff with kbin. And it shows when it comes to 3rd party app ecosystem. People wanted to build apps for kbin….
Oh, I see. Voyager doesn’t show that because display names are confusing for mentions, can be used to impersonate, and distracting. It might be an option to enable in the future, off by default.
To clarify how I really feel, here’s my hot take: display_name is a really awful feature and should be removed from Lemmy.
They are dangerous by default because the very concept implies that clients should render display_name instead of the username, if it exists. Which is unwise: Apps have to choose between replacing (bad for impersonation/UX/distraction reasons) and showing both (which just looks duplicative most of the time).
What makes this feature even more frustrating is that people are now using display names for their username + flairs of actually important things, like gender identities. (for example, display_name="Alex (he/his)")
It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation for Lemmy clients. Some people are using display_name for important info like gender identities, and yet display_name is so incredibly easy to impersonate people and otherwise abuse.
What is the solution? I think Lemmy should ditch display_name and replace with flair (or something like this). The general idea is that flair is NOT a replacement for your username, but rather it will be displayed alongside it.
Maybe even make flair per-community like Reddit. I think that was a much better design than what Lemmy currently has.
You might have missed it, but I mentioned there will probably be an option added in the future to turn on display names (off by default).
As for other Lemmy clients, I always encourage people to look around and find what works best for you! There are a lot of great apps and what is “best” depends on the person using it.