this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2023
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I'm a reddit refugee like many others, and was delighted to find Canada well-represented in the fediverse!
Now I've been exploring various communities and have a question. Many posts seem to offer a link to another instance and all the comments are local to that instance. I don't think I can post there without opening a new account? Or am I wrong? I can comment in the post containing the link, but there is usually no activity there, so I can't join an ongoing discussion that way.
Or at least that's the way it appears to me. I'm confused!
If you can access the thread in another community you can post there without creating another account. That's the main draw of this setup. Still new myself and there is some growing pains finding the other instances communities but once I am there it is working
Thanks.
Well, here's an example of what I'm talking about. The post contains nothing but a link but when you follow that, it says You must log in or register to comment.
But I just noticed elsewhere it says I need to subscribe to [email protected]
So I've gone through the motions of doing that, but when I look at Communities -> Subscribed, it now says Subscribe Pending under [email protected].
I'm going to assume that once approved, I can then comment?
What's likely happening is that when you link through and see "You must log in or register to comment", you aren't accessing that post via the lemmy.ca instance. Your account is instance-specific, but as @Aawr said, you can interact with content from other instances (unless that instance or community has rules to the contrary or has blocked your instance).
The way in which you can access that post via your "home" instance of lemmy.ca is either:
Using these, I found my way here: https://lemmy.ca/post/626156
My big question is why can't we have auto-generated links to the appropriate lemmy.ca page for communities on remote instances. It seems odd that following links to communities takes you to the host instance when you generally speaking you won't be logged in there. Hopefully this feature will come in the future (or maybe it already exists but I haven't found it)
That feature is actually partially implemented, but the client you're using (web browser or mobile app) fights you a bit in interesting ways:
On web, when typing in a Lemmy community like [email protected] the client will try to help you complete it, but it completes to a remote instance link: [email protected]
If you change the markdown for that link to point relatively, then it follows standard URL conventions and works in your current instance: [email protected] (You can select
view sourceon this comment to see how I modified this link) However, this same link will probably not work on mobile clients, as the operating system determines how to handle URLs.Thanks. I'm not sure that's exactly what I'm imagining, because this still involves hard-coding an instance to the link. People from many different instances might be viewing the link, so I'd imagine a flow like: when you mouse-hover a link to a community, a little popup appears which provides a custom link based on your home instance. So whether [email protected] is a link to the lemmy.ml or lemmy.ca domain wouldn't matter, ideally you'd always get the option of viewing the community from your home instance at a single click. Hope that makes sense, today is my first day after all.
I totally agree. That's the behaviour I also expected from the default "!"-prefaced community links. Unfortunately it currently doesn't work that way, but if I have time later this week I may take another look into the source code to see if an easy fix can be done.
Found this recent GitHub issue discussing this.
Wow, that worked perfectly! Thank you so much!!!
No problem! Happy to help.