Hi all! I'm totally new to this online format and I'm just wondering... What's flair, precious? What is it, what does it do, why would I want to set it if I'm not in a workspace that requires at least five pieces of it? Can someone please explain flair in the context of this platform to me? Thanks!

:D I got that reference!

• You see that "[she|her]" in your account name? You could move that to your flair, so it appears everywhere
• You can set up another flair per community, so in my example: I've set "Shadowrun" in !rpg@ttrpg.network so anyone reading knows my perspective might be different than the most common "D&D" perspective
• And then, community mods can set up flair for the community. So when someone writes a post they can mark that post as "TODO" or "Discussion" etc. And later on one can click on that flair, in order to show only "TODO" posts, for example

I think that makes sense. So it's just a way of letting people know something about the user. Thanks for the detailed response!

The flair in community can also be used for shorting and filter content. For example :

https://piefed.social/c/fediverse?flair=Microblog

If you are not interested in microblog post, you can filter them :

thanks for the additional info, snoopy! also wondering about user tags. are those similar to flair?

As an example, I prefer folks in !nwsl@lemmy.world set their flair to what soccer team in the league they follow.

that's fun! gonna have to start setting some flairs.

No, they are different.

You can change/define a user's tag per community in the sidebar.

For example :

• In this community, my user's tag is wiki editor
• In !fediverse@piefed.social, it is warm typewritter

And there is also pronoun. Pronoun are defined in Settings > profil.
I don't recall well how they works. But i think you should write pronoun in the first columns, then write whatever suit you in the second columns : she/he/they...

You can change/define a user's tag per community in the sidebar.

For example :

• In this community, my user's tag is wiki editor
• In !fediverse@piefed.social, it is warm typewritter

That's just your flair, right?

User tags are indeed a different system, and not something supported by PieFed itself, as far as I can tell. Apps like Voyager and Thunder (which both work with PieFed) have their own user tagging system.

While a flair is something that a user sets for themselves to be seen by everybody on PieFed, a user tag is something that a user sets for someone else and is only seen by the user who set it. It allows me to tag you as a "Helpful user". It only appears that way to me, and you appear that way no matter what community I see you in. I can tag an annoying user as a "Troll" and they won't know unless I tell them.

It's a bit confusing because the word flair is used for two things - the bits of text people put after their name and the categories within communities that posts can have.

Post flair can be used for filtering and blocking while user flair is just for information and fun.

There's another wrinkle too - if you have no flair on your name (in the current community) AND have 'Pronouns' as one of your extra fields on your profile, those pronouns show up as flair too.

I hope i haven't mixed name with user tag, user flair 😅

But yeah that's good to know, thank. I never used this feature. :)

Only five? You're lucky AF. The standard's fifteen, per the widely lauded historical document Office Space. 🧏🏼‍♂️