How important are reddit-style flairs for people? There's the raised issue https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/317 which has it listed as a far-future, with questions as far as how to handle federation.
Personally, having at least an initial implementation done on a community level would be largely sufficient, with expansion to instance-wide being optional. The situation I've found most useful, personally, is sports-related groups with your favored team being your flair. This gives context to comments without constantly having to say "as a X fan"
We used flairs on the Lockpicking sub as awards as people progressed through different levels of locksport. I'm dreading having to give thousands of those out again here if user flairs are a thing.
They can be very handy for context, or even fun. For example, I have my "Galaxy Note 20" flair on /r/Android so anyone seeing my comments can know I am speaking from a Samsung phone perspective without me having to state that each time. On /r/nba people have their preferred team set as flair so others can shittalk back to them based on what team they follow, which is a lot of the fun of /r/nba.
There are many more examples in the different subreddits I would frequent, but regardless, I would definitely like community-specific flair options on the Lemmy instances. For example, the option to have your preferred distro as a user flair on [email protected]
As a mod, I use userflairs to restrict certain people from posting, which cuts down on offtopic posts. And yes people can intentionally incorrectly flair themselves, but in general they won't do that (most rule breaking offtopic posts aren't done intentionally, they just never read the rules).
Per-community flair is nice in particular contexts. Like in a community focused on a specific league, a flair to show what team you support. But in a politics community I think flair for the party you support would end up really biasing the conversation.
I think in some cases it can be an important contribution, say you are in programmers career website and people write advice, some of those are unemployed or students, other are senior developers or managers , it could be useful that they have some credentials.
IIRC, there's like two primary contributers to lemmy, and one to kbin. I can understand why features like these are far away in the timeline. But with the influx of people, more contributors can quickly lead to accelerated development, especially on non-core features.
In certain communities they are pretty key. For example, I lurk a lot of trans meme subs on Reddit where user flairs are important for knowing the right pronouns to use for somebody and post flairs are important for content warnings.
On /kbin there is an option to add a badge to new link/article (and separately to add hashtags). However, I don't know if it works. I am summoning @ernest - are badges flair-equivalents?
Indeed, that's right. This function is currently disabled to avoid complications. I need to temporarily hide the form field. The badge defines a magazine owner, and once marked, it appears next to the title, providing additional filtering options within the magazine.