this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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...Did you add an unescaped RTL toggle character on your user name?
</span></div>For the record, I noticed because I use Friendica:
Jeroba only flips the instance domain, that is way more wild
Voyager just ignores it
Voyager shows username, he probably changed display name
Yay I am in screenshot
What's it like being famous? 🤩
Meh
📸
Funnily enough, it is correctly escaped in the client they developed, Photon
it actually isnt intentional that it works fine, it's some miracle of how i split the instance name and the username in markup. i was a little disappointed that nothing funny happened when i added that initially
Call me unsurprised if @Xylight added it as a way to test for rendering errors across Fediverse clients
Same with voyager
Nice
i do remember doing that a long time ago
Doing QA testing for free? You and lil bobby tables would get along great
I strongly think Lemmy clients should have a toggle to show usernames instead of display names. Some of the Unicode is super obnoxious.
Some Lemmy clients like summit do (which I keep on, because display names are often cancer)
And now you're about to nerd-snipe me into checking if control characters are valid for user names in ActivityPub
There's probably some restrictions because I tried making an instance that had a user with a completely empty username and it didn't federate.
Connect lets you filter out the Unicode into a-z, which is nice
By the way, if you want to replicate this effect for fun and profit, the control character you're searching for is U+202E RIGHT-TO-LEFT OVERRIDE (or RLO for short)