Why the exclamation mark?

submitted a week ago by

edited a week ago

Just came over from Reddit and found this community but noticed the ! in front of the name. Why is that there? It kinda makes it look like it’s impersonating another community. (Although the search doesn’t return anything else)

Edit Thanks for all the answers!

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FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website

a week ago

Users are @ whatever @ lemmy dot whatever. Communities are ! whatever @ lemmy dot whatever. (Guide)

Libb@piefed.social

edited a week ago

Hi & welcome,

As others have mentioned, it’s a way to link to a community. More specifically, it’s what allow to share a link to a community (not to a specific post, just the community itself) that will work no matter what instance anyone is clicking it from, unlike your usual link.

The Fediverse is still quite new and still has many rough edges. Its fragmentation into multiple instances, that are working together while also being completely independent is both one of its strength (independence, resilience and… choice) but is also one of those rough edges I mentioned: standard links don’t work well when one wants to share a link between different instances. This is the best workaround for now ;)

edit: typos

Successful_Try543@feddit.org

a week ago

As others have mentioned, it’s a way to link to a community. More specifically, it’s what allow to share a link to a community (not to a specific post, just the community itself) that will work no matter what instance anyone is clicking it from, unlike your usual link.

Specifically, !buyfromeu@feddit.org links to the local copy on your instance of /c/buyfromeu@feddit.org and thus, allows you to post and comment using your account on your instance, whereas https://feddit.org/c/buyfromeu@feddit.org links directly to feddit.org and would only allow you to post and comment if you have an account on feddit.org.