If you’re on version 0.9.0 of the Lemmy webclient, you may have noticed that the full display names for communities is now displayed everywhere, if the community has one. This is a new look Lemmy is trying, but for it to work well, display names should be short. If you have a display name on your community, I recommend shortening it to at most a few words, and put the long description in the sidebar.
You should also choose a display name that in itself describes the community, since it won’t readily display the actual community name outside of the community itself. Putting inside jokes or something like that in the display name also won’t work well in this new style. Maybe just put the formatted version of the community name itself.
For example, for /c/announcements on this instance, a good display name might just be “Announcements” or at most “Lemmy Announcements” instead of “Announcemets for both the Lemmy project as a whole and this Lemmy instance”. The last one should go in the sidebar.
This is ridiculous. The software should just show the real name of the communities in this cases. The display name worths nothing if it’s just the name of the community.
The display name is now meant to be a formatted version of the actual name, which is easier to read than a snake_case string, or one that has contractions to fit in the character limit. Detailed information about the community should go in the sidebar.
It allows for more flexibility while still being easy to link to. Think of the major subreddits that you might struggle to link because their name is too long or you’re not sure how to spell it or you can’t remember how many As are in it. I think this is to make that a lot easier for those kinds of communities.