So lets say my home instance is Instance A, but I’m browsing Community 1 in Instance B. Now in that community I see a comment that I want to reply to with a link to a comment I saw in Instance C, community 2, just because I think it’s the most relevant to the discussion.
If I use the URL from the 2 chains “link” icon, that will send users to https://instance.a/comment/####### on my home instance. So that will send anyone from another instance who follows my link, to my instance and log them out of their account…
If I use the URL from the rainbow network “link” icon, it will send the user to https://instance.c/comment/#######, thus logging them out of their account on their instance (unless instance c happens to be their home).
But what about users coming across the conversation from Instance B? Or Instance D or F, or H? Is there a way to format the URL for that link such that anyone can follow it without moving to another instance, and/or logging out of their home instance?
This feels to me like it would be an important core feature of a platform like this… otherwise when sharing ideas, usability becomes… challenging.
I’ve had similar issues with Mastodon. You can mention people, you can boost and reply to posts, etc., you can link to a post on the same server, and Mastodon will adapt the links just fine. But if you link to an individual post on another instance, it jumps out of Mastodon and opens the web page directly.
It looks like there is a feature request for Lemmy to fix this, but it hasn’t been touched in a while.
That said: clicking on a link to another instance shouldn’t actually log you out of your own. If you come back to your instance, you should still be logged in.
Yeah, logged out is the wrong term. You’re just interacting with a page where you’re not logged in… so let’s say you want to reply with your own comment… how do you find the version on your instance?
If I really care, I end up either using search from my instance or visiting the community from my instance’s community and scrolling back if it’s a recent post.
I wouldn’t really call it convenient though. You have to really want to comment on that post.