Hi all!

So, I’m assuming everyone has seen links like https://beehaw.org/c/news and clicked through to find it doesn’t work right because it’s a different site (I’m assuming a different instance here).

Well, I just stumbled across an interesting feature: if you enter a link in the following format, it works for everyone regardless of instance of origin:

[News](/c/news@beehaw.org)

News

[My User](/u/barbarian@lemmy.reckless.dev)

My User

You’re welcome!

  • jonah@lemmy.oneEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    The only problem is that if your instance doesn’t know about that community yet, it’ll just 404, you still have to search for it first because visiting the link doesn’t make your instance fetch the community yet.

    This should still be the default behavior when it autofills a community link though, I hope they make this change 👍

    • PriorProject@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Seeing the rampant confusion this causes when trying to subscribe to remote communities makes me wonder if the full community list could be shipped on initial federation, and community creation/change events could be eagerly shipped network-wide.

      I get that in federated/peer-based systems you need to be choosy about eagerly propagating messages network-wide, but the list of extant communities seems like it would be fairly small even on a big server. Like hundreds would be common, and tens of thousands of communities on a big server could still compress down to a message-size of a few KB. Having the /communities/ search and all-communities page do something useful from the moment of federation seems like it would reduce a lot of confusion.

    • Barbarian@lemmy.reckless.devOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      Maybe you could bring it up with the Kbin devs? I’m sure it wouldn’t be too crazily difficult to have it work similarly over there. Just need to swap /c/ out for a /m/. Probably similar needed over here to translate /m/ to /c/ too.

  • TauZero@mander.xyzEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Ok so linking communities and usernames works reliably for me on the web this way:

    News - [News](/c/news@beehaw.org)
    PriorProject - [PriorProject](/u/PriorProject@lemmy.world)

    But how do I universally link a post or comment? The comment ids are different across instances! This comment by @PriorProject@lemmy.world for example has a canonical URL (colored pentagram icon):

    https://lemmy.world/comment/18453

    And the link to it on my instance (chainlink icon):

    https://mander.xyz/comment/240478

    None of these work:

    comment - [comment](/comment/18453@lemmy.world) - 404
    comment - [comment](/comment/18453) - wrong comment for me comment - [comment](/comment/240478) - works for me but not you
    comment - [comment](https://lemmy.world/comment/18453) - works but cannot reply since not logged in

    • PriorProject@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      PriorProject - PriorProject

      image

      I have nothing to add, I’ve just been summoned. It’s confusing, though. I’m not sure anything works consistently in a way that anyone wants across apps and web-ui right now. If people decide on a best-practice, I’d like to read about it in docs or a sticky post. The official docs that show post/comment syntax are silent on referencing communities and mentioning users. This could be an opportunity for a first PR to improve them if someone figures out the best practice.

  • PriorProject@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    There are an irksome number of ways to express a community:

    The one that gets advertised in the sidebar is !lemmy@lemmy.ml. I’d love to see a canonical format established that has a superset of the useful behaviors of the non-canonical representations.

    Edit: Most of those don’t get hotlinked automatically. Does a bang-prefixed link do anything useful (no it doesn’t)? And you pointed out c-prefixed does get hotlinked and work.

    Edit2: As commenters below note, the behavior varies between web-ui and jerboa. 🤮