this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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The way pronouns are handled is a bit of a hack, it's all just a string (using the display_name feature), and so the things you propose are difficult
Hmm. Is it more than a database migration to make a many-to-one pronouns-to-user relation and some mid layer query cleanup?
Maybe you could highjack somewhere and construct the display_name rather than just storing it and sending it, but... not sure how good of an idea that is.
The display_name is all of what is displayed (including the username)
That makes sense to me!
If it's helpful I could volunteer to work on this. I have made contributions to Lemmy on the past and been in the matrix but for infosec reasons am using new aliases.
Well if you can get something upstream that would work as pronouns (either specifically, or just like tags or something) that would be cool.
As said, the way hexbear treats it is special and is mostly just hijacking the display_name feature. If you want to understand: in save_settings line 108 (currently) sets the display_name before it is saved, and that function (hexbear_validate_pronouns) it uses is at the bottom of the file, said fn then uses the hexbear_find_pronouns function in utils.rs
Ah, makes sense. Makes me think I might need to brush up on ActivityPub again first, which I remember being very painful to learn
There is nothing in ActivityPub specifically regarding pronouns. They are treated as one type of optional metadata or another depending on the implementation. Mastodon users take an ad-hoc approach of setting a "pronouns" tag (which receives no special treatment in the software, but people can see it when looking at a user profile). Hexbear appends it to the display name. It would be interesting to get something like this standardized, but at the moment it is entirely ad-hoc as far as ActivityPub goes. You will find no official documentation (though you might find some discussions out there).