In my opinion the only good thing it does is to create copies of already existing communities, so basically people tend to follow one community or the other and it divides the people who could be active.
If you want to create a community that’s similar to one and for some reason you don’t want to be a part of it, find another name, if you can’t find another name, create your own instance. So if Lemmy is federating now we could have /c/worldnews, /c/world_news, and the same applies to every other instance that decides to do the same. In my opinion this only segregates people.
The same applies to uppercase letters, which Reddit uses but luckily Lemmy does not, imagine how many copies of a community could be created if you use both.
You would have to ban more than just the hyphen, so might as well leave it as is
That’s the only character allowed, so everything else is already banned. If you try to create a community it says “lowercase, underscores and no spaces”.
In that case, why not keep the only special character allowed
In that case, why keep the only special character allowed?
There must have been a reason – let’s ask the person who decided this
The reasons were given, and personally I don’t find it convincing enough, but your previous comment was not an argument, was just you saying “let’s keep it because yes.”
Let’s keep it for readability then, no harm done