Is there a way to have a link to a post resolve to a users home instance?

octoperson , 19 days ago

Answer from @thegiddystitcher when I asked the same question;

Good question, and sorry to disappoint but I believe the answer is still no. This has been talked about a lot ever since the initial exodus over from Reddit, so I can only assume there’s a complicated technical reason why it’s not a thing yet.

If you’re Lemmying from a browser there’s a tool called Lemmy Universal Link Switcher that I’ve heard good things about, although full disclosure I’ve not used it myself. It doesn’t solve the problem of generating instance-agnostic links but it does try to solve it from the reader’s side.

l_b_i OP , 19 days ago

So a hacky solution that uses lots of javascript to search your home instance and re-write the page. Got it.

otter , 19 days ago (edited 19 days ago)

Actually just learned more about this! See the post on !newToLemmy, or use this link to test: lemmy.ca/post/9712488

What I use when clicking on a link is !instance_assistant, it will take you to the post on your home instance.

The option when posting is to use lemmyverse.link, which you can put before the URL. For example: lemmyverse.link/lemmy.ca/post/9712488

I’ll probably use both. I’ll include lemmyverse.link in my posts when promoting communities, and I’ll use the extension for my own use. At least until there’s a fix in Lemmy itself.

ptz , 19 days ago

Sadly that breaks things for the UIs that put in the effort to resolve those automatically. I guess I can add a patch to filter out the lemmyverse redirector lol.

ptz , 19 days ago (edited 19 days ago)

Not natively (that I’m aware of).

A few 3rd party UIs will detect community/user/post links and re-write them to fetch locally.