Lemmy Universal Link Switcher rewrites all links to Lemmy instances everywhere to your home instance! Now rewrites post/comment links! 1.2.0 Release!

greasyfork.org Lemmy Universal Link Switcher

Ensures that all URLs to Lemmy instances always point to your main/home instance.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/530162

Please report issues with this version either here or at the issue tracker.
Changelog v1.2.0
Add rewrite support for posts/comments
Try to not rewrite federation links
Description
Lemmy Universal Link Switcher, or LULs for short, scans all links on all websites, and if any link points to a Lemmy instance that is not your main/home instance, it rewrites the link so that it instead points to your main instance. Currently only works for community/user links.
Also works on Firefox Android with the Tampermonkey extension!
Features
Rewrite links to Lemmy posts/comments to point to your home instance. Only after hovering over them, because getting home posts/comments links require communicating with the Lemmy servers, and we don't want to spam the servers.

Instantly rewrite all links of communities or users to Lemmy/kbin on all websites everywhere to your new instance! The rewritten links will have an icon next to it, and hovering/touching the icon will show you the original link, allowing you to go there if you want to.

If you are already on a page that has a corresponding page on your home instance, a link will automatically be added to the page header.

Home Instance Setup
Simply visit the Lemmy instance you want to set as your home while the script is active. You will be asked if you want to set this instance to your home instance:

If you initially set your home instance wrong or just want to change it, no worries - simply go to your settings on your new home instance and press the button for it!

Coming soon
Rewrite kbin post/comment links
Better rewriting support for kbin community/user urls (e.g. sort options are currently ignored)
Nicer tooltip styling (fit into page theme)
Signify that "Show at home" button is loading for posts/comments

31 comments

I was just thinking that needs to become a feature. More technically minded folks could easily update the link on their own to plug into their Lemmy instance to subscribe, but for new users that could prove cumbersome.
I wonder if the functionality could be brought directly into clients.
- On native clients definitely, but this rewrites links on all websites everywhere. So idk, if you open an external link like a website article, it mostly opens in your browser. The client most often does not have control over your browser so can't rewrite links. This script can and does.
  
  Ah, that's a good point. I was thinking specifically within Lemmy apps, and not so much across the board.
- It’s a huge issue for mobile app users. Definitely something that should be written into any app that is being developed for Lemmy.

Noob here! Why would you want to? This Is the first federated service I've used!
- You're currently on lemdit.com and view the whole Lemmy fediverse from there. But I'm on lemm.ee. So let's say I want to share you a cool thing I made, so I link you to a post I have saved on my end: https://lemm.ee/post/530506
  This link (https://lemm.ee/post/530506) is actually the link to this post right here, but viewed by me from my instance. If you click on it without this extension, you will leave lemdit.com and go to lemm.ee, and thus not be logged in anymore and also you can't comment/save/anything that needs login anymore.
  So that's where this script comes in. I post you the link https://lemm.ee/post/530506, and my script automatically changes that to https://lemdit.com/post/23135.
  So now even though we were on separate instances and I posted you a link to my instance, you can view it from your instance and immediately comment/save it/etc.
  This should be added to Lemmy itself, and it probably will eventually. But! What if you find a Lemmy link on DuckDuckGo/Google? Then you need something like a user script or browser addon, because Lemmy obviously can't add code to DuckDuckGo/Google pages.
  
  Pretty ingenious, makes using Lemmy a lot smoother! Thanks for your hardwork!
  
  Ah right! I didn't realise that switching instances would invalidate your Auth! This sounds very useful. I'm with you that the platform should probably just handle this!
  
  Yea this needs to actually be baked into base Lemmy.
  
  This is super clever but I wonder how this can be incorporated into Lemmys base functionality

Your script is missing my instance @iusearchlinux.fyi. There are a couple dozen of us there. I can just edit the file of course.
- I will update the lists of instances within the file and make sure that yours is in there :)
- Just updated the script and your instance is in it now. I will add a feature later to add your own instances easily though as well.

Wow that sounds useful, nice one!

Why are you trying to maintain an instance list? Just ask the user to input their instance URL. It will simplify the code and make it extensible to self-hosted instances and you don't have to try to list every lemmy instance in existance.

I was just asking about yesterday how to do this. I'll have to try this out, thanks!

Very useful, thanks!

Thanks! I literally thought that I need something like this on the last post I browsed, scrolled down and here it is!
I mostly browse Lemmy through RSS, and most of the links I use are from non-home instances.

So glad you put this together! I threw together my own as a temporary fix, but I don't actually know javascript so I've been waiting to see if someone would share a proper version. Thanks for the hard work on this!

I had installed Fediverse redirector 0.1.2 by KaKi87 two days ago. Is this the same or is it better?
- I don't know, you tell me. You have used the Fediverse redirector :D

Thanks for the good work @Azzu@lemm.ee
One issue, I managed to do this:
- Thanks for the report, yes, I actually noticed that already, sorry about that! I'm a bit busy today so I will probably only get around to fixing it tomorrow. I hope it is not too much of a bother until then, if it is, you can disable the feature completely by searching the script for HOME ? addShowAtHomeButton() : false and replacing that whole thing with false.
  
  a hard refresh will fix, so not too much of an issue

another minor bug, I'll often get logged out if coming into my home instance from an external one
- My script has nothing to do with logging in or out of Lemmy itself. So if you actually get logged out of Lemmy itself, that is an issue to take up with your instance admins. Or do you mean that you get a message that you need to visit your home instance to update the authentication?

31 comments