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:
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@lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/18177167Would be THE instance-agnostic link for that post, and
/c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/9620373THE 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/@/). 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.
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.
This would still leave the problem of people not being able to just copy paste the url from an address bar. Re-learning how to link stuff is something some wont ever figure out. The relative linking of communities was a stopgap, and they break on kbin for obvious reasons.
Relative links aren’t an ideal solution anyway, as different clients handle things differently. A relative link that works in the default webUI, wont in photon, and vice versa (though photon already figures out links way better than the vanilla webUI does).
Not to mention that you’d still want to have absolute links work, too. Both within any client, and when opening links shared outside lemmy, and have them work in a way where you can interact from whatever account you have. By that point you may as well just figure out absolute links for everywhere.
Why would they copy-past from the address bar when every post and comment already has a button that copies the url to their clipboard for them?
Also, nothing I’ve suggested breaks absolute links. Hell, I’ve even been pointing out that I would like existing links to keep working, both absolute and relative.
Because they are used to that? Because that’s what the share button does in any browser?
I don’t understand why you are so combative.
You unaware there have been share buttons on posts/comments on most websites for years and years now? You already have to follow some sort of permalink button to get to a url that lets you share anything more specific than a top-level post, and that was the case in forums dating back to the ninetees.
You’re invoking a use-case that never was so narrow, nor mainstream as you’ve claimed. If people were actually so used to copying and pasting urls from the address bar, google and others would not be holding onto market dominance after all the things they have done to make the address bar in their browsers a pain to use.
Last, its not combative to address your comment point-for-point. I have not demeaned you or your logic, just called out where it was partial and incomplete.
In what way is my point invalid then? I think you are being combative, because you used the idea that people don’t copy urls directly, as if that meant there was a way to get relative ones working well. There isn’t.
People will use absolute links, so they should work. If they can be made to work, why do we need relative ones to solve the problem of links not opening locally?
Sure, when you use the various share buttons all over, you can get different more specific share options.
But when have they ever netted a relative link, much less done so when SHARING?
Generally, you’re right, except that Lemmy is a new use-case. Its like if facebook made you login again because you follwed a facebook.com link from within facebook, all because the user who created the link is in a different time-zone. What’s not to understand about how broken that would be?
An user following an absolute link that doesn’t re-direct them back to their own instance is likely not going to be able to interact with the content there. As things stand, we then have to search up the content we want to interact with on our own instance.
Within the context of a Lemmy user following a link from a comment, at least, the relative link is more useful. For a non-user reading such commente the desired behavior would be to open such links absolutely, pointed to the post’s orinating instance, the commentor’s originating instance, or the instance which is actually serving them that content in the moment, but hey, that’s the behavior we ALL get already, and no-one is proposing breaking it for non-users.
Fact is, Lemmy is already capable of serving up a different parsed url for logged-in users and non-users, the webUI just hasn’t implimented the feature yet, and so here we are.
Not what I’m proposing
Again. Not what I’m proposing.
Only when viewed on one specific client, on one specific fediverse platform.
This is what I’m proposing. Except being logged in isn’t even a requirement for the webUI to open all links it can open locally, locally.
And looking into it, I’d much rather have a system for “mentioning” posts or comments in the same “object@instance” format that we already use to link communities and users, as proposed here. Such a system would have no need for client specific relative url paths, and would boil down the mention to the object ID and the instance where it can be found, allowing any client or even other fediverse platform to easily parse it into something that can be used.