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Cross-Instance Links (midwest.social)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Links to other instances always say I'm logged out (which, technically, I am) that makes the link useless.

For example, I am logged in at my home instance of https://midwest.social If I click a link to go to https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy_support it takes me to that community, but I am not logged in (to lemmy.ml) so I am unable to meaningfully interact with it. I have to manually edit each lemmy URL that I go to in the URL bar in order for me to go to that community with my lemmy account.

So I need to manually change https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy_support into https://midwest.social/c/[email protected] and I have to do this each time I click a link to another instance if I want to post there.

I've been a system administrator for 20 years, and this took me a few minutes to figure out. "Casual" users are just going to be SOL since they aren't going to be analyzing editing URLs to make them work. I feel like the only want to fix this is to have a browser addon intercept any lemmy URLs and modify them to work based on your home instance.

Am I doing something wrong, or is this just how it is?

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[–] shortwavesurfer 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Copy and paste the link into midwest socials search box and it does the work for you

[–] smorks 7 points 2 years ago

exactly this! unfortunately it's a bit cumbersome, but it's the best way to do it currently.

it probably wouldn't be overly difficult to write an extension that will handle lemmy links for you, not sure if the lemmy devs have this as something on their todo list (handling it all from within lemmy i mean).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Hey I was just about to ask the same thing. I tried to form my sidebar links like this [[email protected]](c/[email protected]), which almost works.

Edit: Making links with URL format /c/[email protected] seems to work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Just testing: Like this?

Edit: Looks like /c/main is really all you need for the link, the @domain suffix isn't necessary if the post is on the domain my account is on.

Maybe it's relative to the user? To me, my link above points to https://midwest.social/c/main Is it the same for you?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

No, it's required. To me your link points to nonexistent /c/main on my instance. It looks redundant when you're viewing in the same instance, but people from other instances need it: You want me to see https://suppo.fi/c/[email protected], and not https://suppo.fi/c/main.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

I think the only solution that is not reliant on browser extension is some kind of URL Translator that is build into Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

A nice solution is a domain which only job is to translate everything to the right instance (most popular). Like lemmyweb.xyz lemmyweb.org lemmyweb.etc (many domains owned by different ONG with the same "script" so there is no one single point of failure). The first time you login to this domain you select your user / pass and instance. And then it's all automatic. I don't know if what I'm saying has any sense.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

can short links be used like /c/[email protected] instead of /c/memes?

I suppose if people get used to doing that like /r/example for subreddits instead of linking https://reddit.com/r/example

Ideally, your interface could do this for you automatically, that would be ideal.

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