Lemmy

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PSA: How to link users & communities so it doesn't break for other instances (lemmy.reckless.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi all!

So, I'm assuming everyone has seen links like https://beehaw.org/c/news and clicked through to find it doesn't work right because it's a different site (I'm assuming a different instance here).

Well, I just stumbled across an interesting feature: if you enter a link in the following format, it works for everyone regardless of instance of origin:

[News](/c/[email protected])

News

[My User](/u/[email protected])

My User

You're welcome!

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[–] PriorProject 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Seeing the rampant confusion this causes when trying to subscribe to remote communities makes me wonder if the full community list could be shipped on initial federation, and community creation/change events could be eagerly shipped network-wide.

I get that in federated/peer-based systems you need to be choosy about eagerly propagating messages network-wide, but the list of extant communities seems like it would be fairly small even on a big server. Like hundreds would be common, and tens of thousands of communities on a big server could still compress down to a message-size of a few KB. Having the /communities/ search and all-communities page do something useful from the moment of federation seems like it would reduce a lot of confusion.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Or fetch it when a link is followed for the first time.