Lemmy user names should only allow standard characters
To be clear, some really great community members have these names, but they're everywhere now. And with the right characters you can create some really annoying overlaps: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3790
Enough of them floating around now that I'll probably do a PR for my favorite client to filter them out.
Just a heads-up, some folks (and instances) add pronouns as part of the display name. I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to disable display names, but it's a relevant caveat that would pop up later, so I just wanted to make sure you know now.
This is why I don't understand people getting annoyed if you don't read their display name. No, I don't want to see your ascii art that can change any minute, I want to see the identifier that will always mark who you are.
Why? It's supposed to be anonymous. Why on earth would a site that discusses privacy issues daily want to force people to have individual identifiers for tracking purposes?
There are users I've blocked only due to having username like that. If you're that desperate to stand out I'll make sure it has the exact opposite effect.
I only use the browser version of the site which luckily allows me to hide profile pictures. Signatures aren't a thing here anyway. On forums it's a bit different I feel, as having a profile photo/signature is the norm rather than exception so users with those don't really stand out.
I don't mind blocking people for petty reasons. My blocklist has somewhere from 300 to 500 users I'd guess and I add few news ones every day. Same for communities. I got over the FOMO ages ago and though I'm sure I'll miss things I would've liked to see, the truth is I'm going to miss much of it anyway, so it doesn't matter. Especially since I don't even know what I'm missing out on. My reasoning behind this is that the only way to make social media tolerable is by heavily curating it.
I also have word filters for posts about Elon, Twitter, Trump, Sailor Moon etc. All this greatly increases the signal to noise ratio. Sometimes when I see a blocked user comment something I might log out to check what they said and more often than not my conclusion is that nothing of a value was lost.
I don't see the issue. I don't mean I personally don't mind the names (which I don't), but even after reading your explanation I can't understand what the problem is.
Some characters that are permitted in the Display Name field can totally mangle the layout of the page on a website or even on an app. Like those letters that have a bunch of random noise attached to them that people like to use to symbolize glitchiness or Eldritch corruption.
I would hope that something like mine, which is just standard emojis, wouldn't do that since modern layouts account for those. I kind of agree that there should be some limit, just due to the fact some non-standard characters can totally break the site.
Unpopular opinions tend to be either "Stuff everyone agrees with but I pretend is unpopular" or "I AM A FASCIST AND WOULD LIKE TO PRETEND THAT'S AN OPINION"
Yours is a genuinely unpopular opinion which is great
Yes I used to see lots when I used Jerboa, but not one since switching to Boost. It wasn't something that annoyed me at all, but I see your point, it's something that could be exploited I guess
This reminds me of a situation previously where a user's pronoun wasn't visible to another user because their client did not show display names
A solution for this that doesn't alienate usernames with pronouns and non-latin languages will be tricky IMO, to be honest I'd just leave it as-is since the fancy display names I've seen so far aren't excessive or abusing unicode modifiers.
Just because people use display names for that doesn't mean display names are a good place to indicate pronouns, and it especially doesn't mean that having a client use usernames is alienating anyone who currently puts non-name data in a name field.
I'd much rather there be a dedicated field where it can be treated with the importance it deserves and not just lumped in with other miscellany as a kludge.
They are probably yes, but the French might not agree since é isn't included. Let alone the vast majority of the world who doesn't use the latin alphabet.
This is a sticky situation, I really think your best alternative is to just block the people who are using stuff that's obnoxious. Programming wise there is very few ways that you can limit this without also limiting out non Latin based languages/languages that don't use A-Z. That being said I don't do much with front end I'm curious if it's possible to make a container in the client itself that Unicode characters can't escape from because it seems your issue isn't necessarily the use of the special characters it's the trailing style characters that are bigger than the display box
I like the people, so don't want to block them. And yes, there are tons of libraries for conversions, but would be easier to contribute to my app of choice to show "username" instead of "display name".
What the fuck is a standard character? The world is too big for this kind of policing. I don't hang art on my wall, but I can't imagine wanting to BAN if I find it distracting if other people do it.
The words they write is in the language you want, but their identifier is distracting? I don't see the problem. Let Lemmy be fun. If you like plain font names, go by one. "Lemmy shouldn't allow... " arguments should have a lot more backing than what was expressed.
Edit: I will say that OP has convinced me that there is an in fact a problem with the implementation. Somehow in the very small post, there was no room to highlight the best example. There's a lot of scrolling to get the image posted in OP's comment
So is the unpopular opinion that there is a problem with that image? Because that kinda sounds like a popular opinion. Is the unpopular opinion that lemmy should only allow characters from a fixed set? This is where I think my mind would have to be changed. You have not convinced me this is the only solution.
But the fact that you don't like them wasn't the opinion you posted. You didn't say even that they shouldn't be used. It seems you've convinced a lot of people of that they shouldn't be used. I'm clearly not an offender.
The phrase "only allow" is in the headline. That is indeed an unpopular opinion. You brought it up with lemmy devs. No one thought your solution was feasible. I didn't see anyone seriously not recognizing your annoyance.
So you asked the experts. They ignored you. So now you are trying to convince (yes, you are here to convince to some level.) the non-experts at Unpopular Opinion of the very fallacious reasoning that limiting a character at the API is the only way to deal with this.
Maybe I just am missing what opinion you are trying to state. But it seems like you want people to think that the devs should limit the character set because that is the only way you see to stop these distractions. I don't want people bothering the devs with this solution. It was thought out. I hope there is an implementation that fits your needs.