I’m just wondering if there’s any strategy to link to a post in an instance agnostic kind of way.

Take for example this post which originates in !lemmy@lemmy.ml.

If someone sent me that link but I did not have a lemmy.ml account, then I can read it but not participate.

If I have an account at lemmy.world then it’s not trivial to find that post on that instance. I can’t just edit the url because the post ID is not the same. I’d have to navigate to lemmy.world/c/lemmy@lemmy.ml and find the post from that feed. This might be possible for recent posts but becomes very difficult with any posts even a little stale.

My understanding of “how lemmy works” is very naive, but I assume it’s not possible to generate UUIDs for posts. That being the case you’d need separate lookup servers that maintain lists of urls for posts and can translate between them.

  • Matt@netmonkey.techEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    This method here will work.

    • On this post, do you see the little rainbow Fediverse icon? Click on that. You’re now looking at the original post on the server from which it originated. The post on lemmy.pethchat.org was federated to that server from lemmy.world where the post originated.
    • Go to the search tool on your Lemmy server, and put that lemmy.world URL in there.
    • The post will show up, and you can interact with it as it appears on your Lemmy instance.

    Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any questions.

    • dogmuffinsOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      This is definitely good to know, very helpful information, but it doesn’t really answer my question.

      My question is more around whether it’s possible to share a post with someone which will open the post on their preferred instance. Given the other answers here the answer to this is “no”, but I suspect that this will need to be addressed, although I have no idea how.

      Even with the above guidance (which is great btw), I still can’t share a post with a non-technical user in a way that they will be able to interact with it, unless they know the above process for finding a post.

      Edit: actually I couldn’t get your last 2 steps to work.

  • Barbarian@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    A link like [this](/c/lemmy@lemmy.ml) will work for website users on instances with at least one person subscribed to that community. There is an open issues to generalize this so that clicking the link doesn’t crash Jerboa, and another one to load data from the remote instance instead of just 404ing. I know that’s not amazing news, but this is an open source project under active development.

    Posts cannot be universally linked across instances as each instance has a different id, correct. I’m not sure anybody’s thought of a way around that, even before considering dev time. Definitely a longer-term issue to tackle.

  • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I have also been wondering if there is a way to do this. If not, we should prioritize figuring it out because it’s a crucial function to be able to easily link between instances so that people can interact with the content.

  • mattreb@feddit.itEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I would love to know this too but my guess is that there is no easy way to deal with this atm… A cross-instance guid don’t seem impossible to me, but im also fairly new to Lemmy…

  • atalocke@forum.basedcount.comEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m guessing the point is that post content gets synced between instances, so if I’m commenting from my site you’d be able to link to the same post and same content.