There's a bunch of browser extensions as well to add a "show on my instance" link whenever it detects a Lemmy instance page which basically does the same thing automatically for you, pretty useful.
Then the technology behind that extention needs to be built into Lemmy itself.
I get how this concept works now, but I keep saying that if Lemmy wants to grow it needs to be idiot inviting. The kind of place where you don't need to think. The kind of place where you don't need to learn.
Because Lemmy growing means people who are not part of Lemmy, JOINING Lemmy. The thing is, I feel like techie linux users already know about Lemmy, and if they aren't using it, it's by choice. For whatever reason. But the type of people who choose to use Linux are a tiny tiny slice of society.
But then you look to the rest of the world. And guess what. We're all idiots out here. My dad who's 80 years old still calls his Windows XP machine "that new fangled crap". He USES Windows XP, but only because his Windows 3.1 machine died in 2005, and radioshack didn't carry any new Windows 3.1 machines.
So now every week I get a call to help him with tech support. That call usually lasts like 12 minutes. First me argueing with him to reboot, and him refusing to reboot. Him getting angrier and angrier that I'm treating him like a child, and then a few minutes later the reboot finishes. In the past 8 years his problem was always solved by a reboot. He never tries rebooting before calling me.
He may be an extreme example, but these people are out there. Idiots are the bulk of society. If the idiots don't know what is happening, they get frustrated and leave. That's what this world is. Politics, religion, business, doesn't matter who's running what, it's all supported by mass idiots.
So the choice is, do you want a small platform full of people capable of tying their shoes, or do you want a much larger more active platform full of idiots?
To be fair, Lemmy is super alpha software. It'll take months and years before the platform is mature and more user friendly and has an ecosystem of really good apps.
We're like, emails just got invented era of fediverse. It's having to explain that yes, if you have a Yahoo address you can still email Hotmail users 2 decades ago all over again.
Now that the big ones like Threads and Bluesky are joining, users will be more familiar with the concepts and it'll get less... confusing.
Was about to ask if there was a way to do this automatically. Does anyone know why this isn't baked into the Lemmy codebase? I'm thinking this would be pretty easy with browser cookies. 🤔
It would have to go through some sort of Lemmy link redirector service because a site can't access another site's cookies. And even then, with third-party cookie sandboxing, that still wouldn't work.
I don't think this is solvable without a browser extension. The best the devs could do is let you enter your home instance URL on each instance such that eventually you've configured them all and it works. But the extensions are just plain better.
It's not implimented because the developers of lemmy have been prioritizing other issues and features. They say they're open to code contributions, so someone would have to volunteer to do it.
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I would love to have domain agnostic URL for lemmy posts. It's not easy to copy and paste from mobile and having multiple redundant URLs like instance.tld/post/12345 and another.tld/post/98765 leads to a discoverability problem.
I was also not aware of this. If the Lemmy software can do this, doesn't that mean there should be a way for apps and web interfaces to do this automatically?
Yet putting it into the search box manages the translation to find the correct post. There are so many areas of Lemmy that still lack polish - and K/Mbin even more so - but here is a great feature that is there yet people don't even realize that.
I am curious: how did you even know to try that - is it written in the docs somewhere, or you just tried it and it worked?
I feel like linking is one of the things that is still pretty broken in the fediverse. I'm not sure it's fixable. Ideally, any link would open in a chosen app, on my home instance. And I don't use the same instance for Lemmy, Masto, etc.
I wonder if it could be something like adding a Link: </post/1234>; rel="activitypub" header or <link rel=activitypub href=/post/1234>. Then a browser (or browser extension) could detect this canonical ActivityPub URL and offer to open it in your configured instance or app. This is basically how RSS feeds work.
To post a link to a post, just search for the URL of the fediverse-icon version of it on your instance, then link directly to that search, chopping off the https://{your instance} from the front
You're still making the user do 2 clicks instead of 1, but it's still quite a lot more convenient than the other thing. It could be made even nicer (arguably "good enough") if the backend could transparently redirect to the first search result along the lines of "I'm feeling lucky," but it doesn't look like right now it can do that.
No I don't think comments works that way. For one, your search returns no results when accessed from on my instance, or from lemmy.world, etc. And for another, I have seen comments have different numerical tags after the instance name - e.g. mousing over the chain link icon vs. the colored fediverse graph sign icon shows the different values there.
Hm. So I understand the different comment IDs on different servers -- the point is that searching for https://discuss.online/comment/9004867 on lemmy.world should then return a link to that same comment, with the right ID number for lemmy.world, on lemmy.world. Because through its federation backend it's able to fetch the comment in question from discuss.online and then determine what is the local ID number on lemmy.world. Exactly the same as how it works for posts.
I just mucked around with it, and it works sometimes but not other times. I suspect that it's because of backed up federation queues or too-short timeouts or something, but it definitely works some of the time. If it's unreliable it may not be that good an idea to put into practice, though, of course.