GitHub - RikudouSage/lemmyverse.link: A redirect service for Lemmy communities which allows users to set their preferred instance.
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A redirect service for Lemmy communities which allows users to set their preferred instance. - GitHub - RikudouSage/lemmyverse.link: A redirect service for Lemmy communities which allows users to s...

Due to the federated nature of Lemmy there’s one small problem: if you link to a community (let’s say https://lemmings.world/c/wwdits) the link takes people out of their instance.

On Lemmy it can be solved easily - use [email protected] and the community opens on their own instance.

But the problem still exists outside Lemmy, let’s say you write a blog post and link to some community - people who already use Lemmy will again be taken out of their instance.

And to solve this I created this project, available on https://lemmyverse.link and https://threadiverse.link (both are the exact same app).

Instead of https://lemmings.world/c/wwdits you link to https://lemmyverse.link/c/[email protected] and you’re greeted with this:

A page letting you choose whether you want to continue to the link or set your home instance first

You can either continue directly if you don’t care, or you can set your home instance and afterwards every link at https://lemmyverse.link will automatically be redirected to your preferred instance (with a small countdown allowing you to change your instance):

A page with a redirect to the target community

If enough people start linking using this service, it will greatly improve the experience for Lemmy users!

Let me know what you think!

Edit: Source code is here: https://github.com/RikudouSage/lemmyverse.link

  • ExcelEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    Some people here are failing at basic reading comprehension… so many comments talking about “Lemmy clients”, when the whole point is that this for links from OUTSIDE of Lemmy.

    That being said, I wonder if this couldn’t be solved by Lemmy directly somehow…? Ideally we could have some way to say “this is my home” that any given instance could know and redirect you from any linked instance back to your home, without any middle-man.

    But I don’t know of any way to share that data without some central repository host (which obviously goes against the fediverse vision). Ideally there could be some kind of “shared local storage” in the browser that all instances could use, but I’m not aware any way to do that.

    Obviously a browser extension would work, but I don’t think that’s a good solution.

    • Rikudou_SageOPEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      I don’t think it’s possible, browsers are private by default and you have no way to share client data across domains. As far as I know, there’s no other way than using my project (or something that does the same thing, of course).