How important are flairs?

How important are reddit-style flairs for people? There's the raised issue https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/317 which has it listed as a far-future, with questions as far as how to handle federation.

Personally, having at least an initial implementation done on a community level would be largely sufficient, with expansion to instance-wide being optional. The situation I've found most useful, personally, is sports-related groups with your favored team being your flair. This gives context to comments without constantly having to say "as a X fan"

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Per-community flair is nice in particular contexts. Like in a community focused on a specific league, a flair to show what team you support. But in a politics community I think flair for the party you support would end up really biasing the conversation.

We used flairs on the Lockpicking sub as awards as people progressed through different levels of locksport. I'm dreading having to give thousands of those out again here if user flairs are a thing.
- is this data dump-able from Reddit? maybe we can at least semi-automate something like that. but pfuh...doing it manually seems really awful.
  if usernames (or some other form of Id like mail) doesn't match, this wouldn't work. but maybe it can take the bulk of work of you...?
- Oh man, that would be a hell of a job

It’s nice to have. Not more, not less.
I can live without it. But if anyone is bored to death and badly need something to implement: please do it!

They can be very handy for context, or even fun. For example, I have my "Galaxy Note 20" flair on /r/Android so anyone seeing my comments can know I am speaking from a Samsung phone perspective without me having to state that each time. On /r/nba people have their preferred team set as flair so others can shittalk back to them based on what team they follow, which is a lot of the fun of /r/nba.
There are many more examples in the different subreddits I would frequent, but regardless, I would definitely like community-specific flair options on the Lemmy instances. For example, the option to have your preferred distro as a user flair on [email protected]

They would be very nice to have, but I think they're not essential.

As a mod, I use userflairs to restrict certain people from posting, which cuts down on offtopic posts. And yes people can intentionally incorrectly flair themselves, but in general they won't do that (most rule breaking offtopic posts aren't done intentionally, they just never read the rules).
So it's an easy way to manage a space.

It's not been something I've felt a need for here, but I understand that it can be more useful in some communities.

I think in some cases it can be an important contribution, say you are in programmers career website and people write advice, some of those are unemployed or students, other are senior developers or managers , it could be useful that they have some credentials.

IIRC, there's like two primary contributers to lemmy, and one to kbin. I can understand why features like these are far away in the timeline. But with the influx of people, more contributors can quickly lead to accelerated development, especially on non-core features.
So, fingers crossed.

Together with emotes they're really great for larger communities since they also allow sorting by flair.
For us over at /r/thegoldengator allows posters to pick one for each streamer or focus, if the post is
artwork
video
photo
clip
highlighting a specific character
For smaller communities though they're probably redundant.

On /kbin there is an option to add a badge to new link/article (and separately to add hashtags). However, I don't know if it works. I am summoning @ernest - are badges flair-equivalents?
- Indeed, that's right. This function is currently disabled to avoid complications. I need to temporarily hide the form field. The badge defines a magazine owner, and once marked, it appears next to the title, providing additional filtering options within the magazine.

I’ve never been a huge flair user on Reddit so I could live without it until it’s implemented.

In certain communities they are pretty key. For example, I lurk a lot of trans meme subs on Reddit where user flairs are important for knowing the right pronouns to use for somebody and post flairs are important for content warnings.

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