Feature: Alternate Source Selector

Implementation Difficulty: Easy

Live Example: https://tesseract.dubvee.org/c/[email protected] (The “link” icon to the left of the post’s URL.)

Rationale: I’m quite annoyed with people whining “pAyWallED!” in news post comments, and this is Tesseract’s way of addressing that (for users of that UI, anyway)

Description:

On posts with links (that aren’t images, audio, video, Youtube, or other media), a dropdown menu is added with links to alternate sources.

Each one will search for the URL in the selected archive provider (currently Ghost Archive, Archive Today, 12ft.io) or Ground News (new in 1.4.5).

Lemmy-UI kind of does this, but completely ass-backwards (only during post creation to set the post link; I’ll spare you my spiel about how that’s a horrible vector for misinformation).

On Youtube-like posts (YT, Invidious, or Piped), the options are changed to go to the canonical YT link, your preferred Invidious instance, or your preferred Piped instance, but that’s just a secondary (but still nice) feature of that component.

Would love to see something like this more widely adopted and am more than happy to answer any implementation questions.

  • @gedaliyahM
    65•4 months ago

    Wow, this is great! Thanks!

    • Admiral PatrickOPEnglish
      44•4 months ago

      Yeah, it’s been pretty useful.

      This is also why I love open source. In corporate, it would be all “patent that so no one can do anything remotely similar” and with FOSS, I’m like “here is a cool thing you might like; please take”.

      Also, I may have a “Part II” of this post for the remote instance browsing feature. Every time I’ve shown that to someone, they look at me like it’s witchcraft. Would love to see that more widely adopted as well.

        • Admiral PatrickOPEnglish
          2•4 months ago

          Can list the communities of any remote Lemmy instance and one-click subscribe to them.

  • jwr1
    25•4 months ago

    That’s actually a great idea! I guess I have no choice but to steal it, so here’s the issue for Interstellar.

  • @SanctusEnglish
    22•4 months ago

    Do it, Jerboa

  • @USNWoodwork
    15•4 months ago

    Lemmy has apps available? I’ve been using a browser this whole time. I used the stock reddit app for years too. I’m such a dunce. Can someone point me toward a decent app?

    • Communist
      8•4 months ago

      My favorites are sync and thunder, but I recommend thunder since it’s FOSS, i’m just waiting for hold to peek.

      • Ænima
        4•4 months ago

        I use both, myself. Jerboa is my NSFW Lemmy login and Voyager is my daily driver for Lemmy. I think both are really awesome, but Voyager’s “hide read posts” saves my sanity!

    • @Asclepiaz
      8•4 months ago

      I barely know what lemmy is, something something fediverse. I use the sync app, moved over from sync for Reddit.

    • @irreticent
      8•4 months ago

      The Boost for Lemmy app is pretty good.

    • @[email protected]English
      6•4 months ago

      https://lemmy.ca/post/26097116?scrollToComments=true

      There are 3 apps that pass the “Does this actually display posts correctly?” test:

      • Jerboa
      • Alexandrite
      • Voyager

      Everything else should be considered in a testing phase. Don’t pay for an app that can’t do spoilers correctly.

      Edit: Don’t pay for an app that doesn’t format text correctly in general, but not doing spoilers correctly is probably the most jarring.

      • XylightEnglish
        3•4 months ago

        That’s not a great interpretation of that test, as some can fail for reasons other than spoilers, or some clients may be better than ones with higher scores (as explained in the disclaimers page)

        • @[email protected]English
          1•4 months ago

          I agree that you shouldn’t pay for any app that doesn’t format text correctly, no matter how it fails, but I think the worst offender is spoilers.

          Something being left-aligned in a table instead of centre-aligned probably isn’t going to destroy the intent, message, or general flow of a post.
          A bot that makes posts 4 lines before you expand it but is instead always 24+ lines long, is a little jarring and disruptive. A post with a riddle, joke, or piece of trivia whose answer is displayed ruins the point.
          Granted, the apps that turn subscript into strike-through are also shitty, but I don’t see subscript being used nearly as often.

    • @[email protected]
      4•4 months ago

      Artic On iOS has been really enjoyable for me. Voyager is a close second. My biggest pet peeve with voyager is not hiding the bars on scroll. Otherwise I would use it.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•4 months ago

      I just installed the default app that it prompted me with. I wonder if other apps can have meaningful more features?

      • @[email protected]
        1•4 months ago

        Jerboa? I don’t mind it, but I’d experiment with other apps if there’s a chance you think you’ll like their UI better. It’s all about preference. That was the thing I hated about Reddit losing all their apps.

  • @TehdastehdasEnglish
    10•4 months ago

    I wish my browser did this when it hits a paywall or a broken link.

  • @[email protected]
    8•4 months ago

    Thank you, this is desperately needed to clean up extra link previews and help lessen bot posts.

  • OtterEnglish
    6•4 months ago

    Cool! While I’m not sure how messy this would be, would it be possible to let the user add/remove options?

    • It could avoid any headaches for you if a company doesn’t like a certain option being included
    • People can remove the options they don’t use, reducing clutter
    • If you add a link in the menu to some fediverse post, people can suggest changes to the defaults, or exchange their personalizations
    • Admiral PatrickOPEnglish
      5•4 months ago

      I’m more proposing the general idea to be adopted by other apps; just using my implementation as an example.

      would it be possible to let the user add/remove options?

      Add? Definitely (and fairly easily). Remove? Not so much (at least in my implementation). Those are the only 3 I know of right now that work reliably. If there are ever more than 3, I would probably move to a dynamic method where you’d just enable certain ones from a list (kind of like Searx-NG if you’re familiar with that). A user adding a custom one would work like adding a search provider to a browser (e.g. https://archiver.example.com/?url=%s)

      In practice, I tend to need all 3 depending on the source URL in the post. Some don’t have a copy of the target or don’t render certain sources as well as others, so having a few to choose from is often needed. Allowing user-custom ones is a great idea though.

      If you add a link in the menu to some fediverse post, people can suggest changes to the defaults, or exchange their personalizations

      I sort-of do that already with suggestions for the built-in Invidious/Piped instances list, but ask that they be submitted via Github or the Tesseract Lemmy community (users can define their own Inv/Piped instances as of a few versions ago). Dunno if I’d want the link to that in the selector menu, but could easily link it from the settings panel where you’d hypothetically edit the archive sources.

      Thanks for the feedback; I’ll probably work on adding support to at least add custom archive services in one of the next releases (and probably eventually work toward a fully customizable version).

      • OtterEnglish
        5•4 months ago

        That all sounds good to me, thanks for sharing the idea! Looking forward to seeing more implementations of this

  • @Gingerlegs
    3•4 months ago

    Thank you, kind internet stranger

  • @[email protected]
    3•4 months ago

    Like the concept very much, but also please just stop linking to paywalled articles folks. I’ve stopped whining but it’s a downvote at least every time.

  • cumEnglish
    2•4 months ago

    Could just submit a pull request instead of asking for a feature