cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15953
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/news@beehaw.org)
[My User](/u/barbarian@lemmy.reckless.dev)
You’re welcome!
This is kind of an annoying feature of this website, like I don’t want to create a separate account just to check out another community? It can’t get ported here?
You don’t have to create a separate account to participate.
If you click the “News” and “My User” links above, they open content from beehaw.org and reckless.dev inside whatever Lemmy server you’re curerntly using. Your account is on lemmy.world, so I’m assuming that’s where you’re browsing. Note the first URL becomes
https://lemmy.world/c/news@beehaw.org.Now view this post on beehaw.org and look at News link. It’s
https://beehaw.org/c/news@beehaw.orginstead.This post is about how to format links to communities and accounts so they’re transformed that way.
While I understand the benefits of ferated servers, I think the inherently fragmented nature of the infrastructure is the biggest hurdle to the adoption of (for e.g.) Lemmy and Mastodon as replacements for Reddit and Twitter.
There is an extra layer of complexity, and the less tech-savvy users who want a simple process to follow diverse communities across many instances are going to run into issues. That group likely comprises the vast majority of potential users.