I just had that problem when you browse to a Mastodon post and ⭐️ it, or try to follow someone. The choreography is clumsy, and the kind of thing that will hinder mainstream adoption of ActivityPub.

acct is IANA official and used behind the scenes with webfinger. It’d be dead-simple to enable browsers looking up an app to handle acct: URLs: an ActivityPub client.

It’s trickier to think of how to handle posts, given the discussion about Lemmy/Mastodon interop… and the ActivityStreams spec has a dozen object types! But I think I’m going to want only as many clients as necessary, and one sounds great, so I’m interested to hear what people are thinking at an infrastructure level

  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
    8·
    11 months ago

    Yup, you can do this for any loanword with unusual pluralisation. You can either use the plural form from the source language or from English.

    Octopi can also be octopusses for instance, but some people will tell you that’s wrong. Ultimately really, if your language is accepted and nobody is confused, it’s valid. The rules really aren’t as concrete as many people seem to believe.

      • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        I would say try it, and you’ll find without a lot of context cues, most people won’t understand you. Language is fundamentally about communication, so the measure is not whether it conforms to some rote form but whether it is effective at conveying an idea. I would say based on that, octopodes is wrong.

      • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
        4·
        11 months ago

        That’s a theory based on the origin of the word, but nobody says that and if you tried to use it to communicate that idea, most people wouldn’t understand what you were talking about. So under a descriptive model of language, no, it isn’t octopodes. It’s only right if it works, and you can’t dictate language rules based on some preconceived idea of what is “correct”. Language is negotiated, not mandated.

    • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      11 months ago

      For Octopus… Octopi is just plain incorrect, it assumes an incorrect loanword origin, even if it is the most common pluralization used.

      Octopus does not come from Latin which would result in octopi. It comes from Greek, so the correct plural should be octopodes.

      The English standard pluralization would still be Octopuses though, and most comprehensible all around without having to explain the whole thing to a new person. In the end it’s all about being understood over anything else.