Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

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Why do communities start with an exclamation mark instead of a hashtag? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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For example, !lemmy starts with an !, but why not start with a # symbol?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think it has more to do with the federated nature of the platform. If you are ingesting content from Mastodon for example, # is a hashtag in a post, and you can tag someone with their username with the @ symbol.

Edit: you can tag people here with @ too - such as @knova@[email protected]

So that leaves a new symbol for community linking

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A hashtag for community seems much better than an exclamation mark.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You already said that

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But you didn't say why Lemmy does not use hashtags for communities.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

probably because a hashtag is already a thing that means something else in other apps. making hashtag mean a community here would give it 2 meaning depending on the app and that's not user friendly cause people will make mistakes if they move between apps.

therefore a new character was chosen for communities to avoid such confusion