https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/9436237
@MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de
(replaced with my own user profile, as I’m not trying to fill other users’ inboxes for no real reason)(also, this somehow worked right when making this post, but not the original comment)
[@MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de](/u/MachineFab812)
https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/9293054 https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/9620373
https://jlai.lu/comment/6487794
While we’re at it, am I missing at instance-agnostic method for linking posts as well?
No, I’m pretty sure that’s a quirk of how the fediverse works. Posts, comments, etc are in two places:
- the instance the community is hosted on
- your instance (i.e. unique to users of your instance)
You’ll want the first (the permalink) for general posting, and the second for your own use. However, lemmy doesn’t handle the first very well, so both options kinda suck.
I honestly don’t think there’s a good solution to this. We can make improvements though, such as lemmy figuring out that a link is a lemmy link, either through special syntax (like @user@instance or !community@instance) or checking a list of known instances, but the real problem is that users need to be aware of instances, and that’s poor UX imo.
I’m working on an alternative to lemmy that solves this (and has a bunch of other drawbacks that I hope are acceptable), but I hope it’s not necessary and someone more clever than me can solve it.
If the comments/posts were just numbered relative to their communities instead of generated by each instance, there wouldn’t have to be this disconnect at all.
/c/piracy.dbzer0.com/post/18177167
Would be THE instance-agnostic link for that post, and
/c/piracy.dbzer0.com/comment/9620373
THE instance-agnostic link for that comment.Don’t even have to redo how the instances generate content numbers for posts/comments generated locally, but set them to pull such numbers in for each post/comment mirrored from another instance. Not even slightly hard to come up with, though I don’t have my laptop with me so I’ll refrain from speaking one the difficulty of implimentation versus all the “legacy-numbered” content already out there.
Yeah, that would work within lemmy, and it would make it easier to detect whether a link is to lemmy or something else (look for /c/<community chars>@<hostname chars>/<rest>). But you’ll still have the issue of clicking a link elsewhere (say, a blog post) to an instance that’s not yours, so you still wouldn’t be able to directly comment w/o copy/pasting part of the URL to your instance.
That said, that change alone would reduce a lot of friction for users. My point is that it still doesn’t fix the root of the problem. I guess we could use a browser extension to auto-redirect to your instance of choice, but that’s just yet another barrier for users.
but set them to pull such numbers in for each post/comment mirrored from another instance.
I think the asynchronous way lemmy handles creating a comment/post and then sending it would make this difficult.
An entirely acceptable answer to both my original question and my suggestion, although I had already attempted to address that. Every instance generating their own, seemingly non-random*, numbers for every post and comment was a big reason my mind skipped to “insanity” for my title - can we say “does not, SHOULD not, scale” any louder? Thanks again.
*
spoiler
Looking at the comment links in the OP cross-referenced with entries on lemmyverse.net, discuss.tchncs.de and lemmy.dbzer0.com have similar user numbers, both an order of magnitude larger(as large? anyways…) than jlai.lu … the reason jlai.lu’s comment numbers has got so high, about one-half instead of one-tenth as the user numbers might suggest, probably boils down to those users being subscribed to a large number of communities, but still not so many as the users of the other two servers. Run that up against the fact that there are fewer communities than users, anywhere, et viola!
That concludes this episode of my conjectural bullshit. Thanks for watching.
It’d also be nice to have the community name in a link to a post or comment, just for general use.
here’s the tracked issue for “Instance agnostic links” https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2987
Much appreciated.
One potential downside to this on the posts/comment front is that if the thread in question is not in a community your instance is federated with, any form of local redirect would yield just an empty post with no comments. Lenny’s current federation is primarily push driven, so when requesting a post from an unknown community will yield no historical comments, as your instance have never subscribed to the community and thus never received the push notifications. Whereas getting sent to the original instance, you’d be able to see the full interaction history and have a better picture of the intended discussion.
I don’t care about getting sent to the original instance per se. Getting sent to a landing page on the local instance that says "Hey, we aren’t federated with that instance, and/or no one on our instance has subscribed to that community. Here’s an externalized(http/url) link to the content you’ve attempted to access, with no guarantee it will work.
Understand that you may have to make an account with that instance or an instance federated with them if you wish to actually interact with this content."
