Xi wants to experiment with using xi/drag person-independent pronouns on this account. So far xi likes using the pronouns, but xi's only written 4 comments and already someone accused drag of talking about Chinese politics when xi mentioned dragself. Xi knows xi's pronouns are confusing, so xi would like to put xi's pronouns in xi's displayname to clear things up.
But the character limit for display names on lemmy.nz is only 22 characters, and xi's handle already takes up 16 characters. Xi would need 24 characters to put xi's pronouns in xi's display name. Xi knows some instances also have a separate field for pronouns, and the pronouns get displayed next to the name without taking up displayname characters. Xi would like a place, or at least enough room, for xi's pronouns, please.
Sorry, but what is it that "Lemmy does not"? Was it the hyphen? That’s unfortunate. Maybe a colon (:) or em dash (—) would work? I’m surprised, considering I’ve seen users with far more absurd characters, like 𝕕𝕠𝕦𝕓𝕝𝕖-𝕤𝕥𝕣𝕦𝕔𝕜 (𝕠𝕦𝕥𝕝𝕚𝕟𝕖𝕕) 𝕥𝕖𝕩𝕥 in their display names.
Though I have to be honest, I don’t particularly like any use of display names other than custom capitalisation and appending pronouns. If I can’t read someone’s display name and type it with an @ mention and get autocomplete because their display name is significantly different from their username, they’ve fucked up and are misusing their display name, IMO. It creates user experience problems.
Xi messed up counting the characters. Looks like Lemmy's character limit is 20, not 22. Display names are good for special characters. Lemmy doesn't allow special characters in usernames because it messes up the URLs. Xi wanted to be Dragon "Rider", but Lemmy doesn't allow quotes in usernames. Luckily, quotes are allowed in displaynames, so xi took dragonfucker for a username and Dragon "Rider" for a display name.