I fully agree. This has been one of my pain points with the UI, not being a user of lemmy.ml (the de facto instance). Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to formulate a report and suggestion on this, but it would likely be better to just kickstart the discussion already.
I found that a possible solution is to use links with relative URLs. So to link to a community and have it work for all users (local and federated), one can write:
That way, users would be led to the community while staying on their instance. The next problem is that federated communities have to be manually fetched, so that link may lead to a 404 error unless someone else on the same instance has already fetched the community.
It isn’t a flawless solution at the moment but relative linking can work.
Paging @dessalines@lemmy.ml – I also think there’s a potential improvement for cross-instance links.
I fully agree. This has been one of my pain points with the UI, not being a user of lemmy.ml (the de facto instance). Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to formulate a report and suggestion on this, but it would likely be better to just kickstart the discussion already.
I found that a possible solution is to use links with relative URLs. So to link to a community and have it work for all users (local and federated), one can write:
[Hello world](/c/announcements@lemmy.ml)Try it out: !announcements@lemmy.ml
That way, users would be led to the community while staying on their instance. The next problem is that federated communities have to be manually fetched, so that link may lead to a 404 error unless someone else on the same instance has already fetched the community.
It isn’t a flawless solution at the moment but relative linking can work.
This is a good find. It would make a lot of sense for Lemmy to format mentions in that way too. Could you open an issue in the Lemmy repo please?
By the way, the fetch problem you mention is already fixed in this pr (but not yet released).