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.
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.