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 !wwdits@lemmings.world 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/wwdits@lemmings.world and you're greeted with this:
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):
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
In my opinion this runs counter to the idea of federation; i wouldn’t use it.
You probably do intend to keep it running for ever, but if you can’t for whatever reason, all links created using this service become dead links. If this were client-side, maybe. But this needs a server to be running at lemmyverse.link and/or threadiverse.link. Imagine someone else gets hold of those domains. They can snoop every use.
I have multiple accounts and might want to choose based on what I’m researching. If it were on a client, it should be a widget, but this doesn’t allow me to switch that so easily.
I think the solution should be for all Lemmy clients to detect links when possible and open them up in-app and/or have browser plugins that can redirect requests on the user’s machine. These won’t cover all the cases that your service can, but i would still prefer that over all Lemmy links being resolved by a centralized service that can read your cookies.