That’s one way to look at it I guess. But I’m assuming the users are queried on page load, so there’s really only “one” set at a time.
Here’s a better example. The post you just made shows up for me as “June 8, 2017 12:45 AM”. If I was to fly across the country to California, I’d expect that post to show as “June 7, 2017 9:45 PM”.
…and I just earned the “anniversary” badge this morning. This does feel like a bug to me.
Could it be mitigated by simply changing the timezone of the server to something more applicable for my community? We’re (mainly) in Australia, so processing everything as, say, GMT+8 or GMT+10 would make this all feel less odd.
Since the server doesn’t know a user’s time zone, maybe the easiest fix for this would be to award the badge one day later? For some, that will mean they get it late, but that will probably not be experienced as a bug as much as an early award is.
Another option might be to simply specify in the UI that these times are based on the server’s time zone.