What's the deal with people putting the lemmy @user in their comments when they're replying to that person? I see AJ doing it, and elsewhere on lemmy it seems everyone is doing it.
It's because you can access Lemmy from other fediverse sites, like Mastodon. Iirc, Mastodon is like Twitter, so when replying to a thread or comment, the reply will @ the users they are responding to
Twitter used to do the same thing in reply tweets. Since mastodon basically just does what twitter did, they decided to clone that feature too. On mastodon, Lemmy posts just look like really long tweets a lot of the time, but with the magic of federation they can reply here too.
It is quite annoying when it gets deep and comments begin with 20 different @'s, but it's just something mastodon does and I don't think they can control it
Hello from the other side! Although annoying (sometimes), federation is quite cool. Plus you have some of my favourite people - Philip Mallis, Daniel Bowen, and I think Marcus Wong even has a profile over there!
I will be honest, I don't understand the appeal of reading the DT from elsewhere, but whatever floats your boat
I suspect that everything still works if if you remove the @ list.
It's a manual step though so even if it does work, it probably won't happen much: people have to know about it, remember it, AND ALSO be bothered to do it.
Oh, neat! Yeah personally I'd remove them in all of my replies if I used mastodon to interact with Lemmy. But luckily it does seem that mastodon mentions don't actually federate as a mention over here, they come up as more of a hyperlinked @ sign, so I don't get mentioned if someone's replying to a reply on my comment or post. I don't mind that much when it's just 1 @, it can come across a little "hey look at me!", but it's just annoying when there's a long thread and more of the comment is @'s than actual comment