this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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I think it's a little confusing for everyone right now. I'll try to explain the easy bits at least.
You can do relative links for communities like this: [text](/c/community@instance)
But these will only work if your instance has already discovered the communities. I think that's where a lot of the confusion behind all of this first becomes an issue. Some links only work if your instance already "knows" it exists.
To get your or any instance to learn about a specific community, you first have to search for it. The most reliable way to do it is to just put the full url of the community into the search box.
And then wait. It sometimes takes a moment to actually find the community. Once it's found the rest should work.
For comments, posts, and threads it's different. Since those will have different unique identifiers on a per instance basis, my understanding is that it's much more complicated for relative links to work. I haven't seen a simple solution yet, unfortunately.
Thanks, this is really useful, and greatly appreciated.
Feels like if someone can come up with a working solution for all this it could really help tip the balance towards mass acceptance.
I know nothing about programming, and I do realise Lemmy is all about being federated, but it feels like it needs some central system - not for ownership or anything, but simply to do the job of linking instances more easily. Perhaps even multiple 'central' systems, all doing the same job as each other, all consistent with each other, but not controlled by any one group/person, so as to avoid disputes and the risk of any single actor dominating the whole.
I dunno, I'm just kind of spitballing here. It'll need someone smarter than me to untangle it!
Somehow, it never came to mind to use relative links for communities...
A reasonable solution for those could be to auto-detect community links in their various forms (/c/community, !community@instance.example, https://instance.example/c/community) and auto convert those into a local link for the user's current instance.
I'd contribute to the codebase if I had time, since community links has been the biggest issue for me so far, having to copy, paste, search etc. for each new community on other instances that I'm interested in, depending on how they've been shared