[…] It’s these fields that are relevant to Lemmy’s API, not the terminology that ActivityPub uses. […]

Fair point! I was incorrectly assuming that Lemmy’s terminology directly matched that of ActivityPub.

[…] Lemmy distinguishes between ‘name’ for username, and ‘display_name’ for the display name. A better link for this is arguably https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/crates/db_schema/src/schema.rs#L735 but whatever. It’s these fields that are relevant to Lemmy’s API, not the terminology that ActivityPub uses. A client might reasonably want to know the limit for a username (as provided in the Site response), because it’s this that’s used for Signup and Login. Display name is set elsewhere, once that’s done, so it doesn’t make sense for actor_name_max_length to refer to this.

Within ActivityPub, the distinction between username and display name is ‘preferredUsername’ and ‘name’, but AP also uses ‘name’ for a bunch of other things (including but not limited to what becomes a post title, a choice in a poll, or the alt-text for an image). There’s some overlap with how Lemmy’s API refers to stuff (e.g. a post title is a post name), but it not a 1:1 match. […]

Thank you for providing this information.

[…] You shouldn’t have to be relying on guesswork by amateurs, irrespective of how many ‘references’ they can quote.

I think you are misunderstanding how I am using references. They are only being used to point to the origin of a bit of knowledge. Their existence does not guarantee any level of accuracy.

[…] What you should be asking, is - “How come when I post a question to Lemmy’s support community, on the instance owned by Lemmy devs, it looks like they just ignore it?”. […]

I have no reason to expect any obligatory answer from anybody. IMO, it would be very entitled of me, or anyone else, to expect otherwise.

[…] I don’t even use Lemmy, so - in my opinion - you’re asking the wrong question to the wrong person. […]

I don’t know you, so how would I know what your level of expertise is regarding Lemmy? You are the one that commented on my post…

[…] I give you reproducible command-line instructions, which match up with your own findings, and it’s apparently not good enough. […]

Did you perhaps not see that I cited your comment’s findings as a source for the solution…? Or is it that you can’t believe that I would dare to exhibit any amount of skepticism of your claim?

You’ve accepted […] one link to a years-old migration as [an] answer,

[…] as that migration shows […]

I’m not sure what you are referring by “migration”. Could you clarify?

[…] You’ve accepted your own unscientific prodding of one particular instance as an answer […]

What exactly do you think is unscientific about it?

I’m not used to this level of rigour to be honest. […]

In my opinion, one should always be open to scrutiny of their claims. One should strive to be precise in their communication — ie one should seek to rectify any uncertainties, ambiguities etc.

Is it known for sure that name is the username? Could it be the display name? In the ActivityPub spec, I found this ^[1]:

name

The preferred “nickname” or “display name” of the actor.

Is there any official documentation for that? Lemmy’s API docs ^[1] seem rather sparse on the subject.

UPDATE (2025-02-02T23:23Z): I found this ^[2] and this ^[3], but unfortunately it doesn’t contain much information.