Announcements displayed with wrong admin, should be anonymous

[benjaoming]

I think I've found a bug, but it's very rare since this software is so awesome 🥇 🏆 👏 🙏

Describe the bug

As an admin of a Mastodon instance, I have posted an announcement to the instance's followers.

However, another admin is shown as the sender of the announcement. This is probably because that admin is the public-facing main contact. I'm just a "co-admin".

On the Mastodon web client, no admins are shown next to announcements, making it possible to send out announcements without a personal sender.

To Reproduce

Write an announcement on a server. See that it is displayed with an admin's profile.

Expected behavior

Announcements should be anonymous since:

1. An announcement may be added by a specific admin on behalf of an entire group of admins
2. The wrong admin is displayed in some cases.

Screenshots

Same announcement in Mastodon:

[cheeaun]

@benjaoming interesting. Phanpy uses the contact info from /api/v2/instance (this?). The intention is to allow users know who's posting and gives the impression that it's an announcement from a person instead of some automated bot or system-generated ones (in other words, feels more humane, grabs more attention).

I'm not sure if the contact info is configurable? I've seen servers use generic 'admin@server' account which kinda solve the who's posting part, while making it less "humane" but it's still better than nothing, I guess.

If this proves to be confusing to users, or causing issues for admins, I'll consider removing the admin UI block 🙏

[benjaoming]

I can't quite guess how common our setup is. So I think it's a good idea to let this perceived (by me) bug sit for a while in order to understand if the issue occurs to others. Or if the behavior is actually largely appreciated by most people.

Choosing an admin contact is configurable indeed, so a work-around would be to temporarily choose the admin contact as the user who is sending announcements.

I think that you have the right idea for many cases, i.e. that announcements and server administration is generally nicer to link to people, rather than anonymous groups/entities. However, the "sticky" behavior and exceptional UI is already guaranteed IMO to grab attention, so the additional name and profile picture may not add much.