PieFedIssue Creating Community: "[This name is in use already.]"
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When attempting to create a community with the URL c/MindfulMaverick, I encounter the error message: “[This name is in use already.]” However, no community by that name currently exists. It’s possible the system is incorrectly flagging a conflict with my username rather than an existing community. In fact, browsing https://piefed.zip/c/mindfulmaverick redirects me to https://piefed.zip/community/add_local, suggesting the name is not actually taken.
Also, there should be a dedicated flair for issues to help categorize and address such problems.
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As to why there is no “issues” flair, one reason for that is that there is a separate community !piefed_help@piefed.social for that. I believe that you are welcome to use either one but the thinking may have been that there it is an “issue” whereas here it is a “question”.
@rimu@piefed.social it may help to mention that other community explicitly in the sidebar, just so people are more aware that they have multiple options to choose from?
Feeds also cannot share the same name as communities, unfortunately. But I don’t see that. But I wonder if it also is the same for users…
Your username may be the problem.
Looking at the webfinger route handler, piefed most likely does not allow the same name for a person, group or feed.
https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/commit/d525ded112306a06a90310be7bac59064aff45fb/app/activitypub/routes.py#L95
It is stated that the user is looked up first, then the community and then the feed. So if you had a community named MindfulMaverick, it could not be looked up by webfinger, as the response would always be your user.
This could be solved by doing what lemmy does: querying all of them and seperating them in the webfinger response by type if they do exist.
I am not a webfinger expert, but my understanding is that what lemmy does is not technically compliant and messes stuff up for some other software (relevant github issue).
I bought this up with feeds and community names clashing before and got told that it’s hard to unravel.