So I’m sure we’ve seen posts/comments like this recently. It gets me wondering if there isn’t a way to create a unified experience across Lemmy instances.
My thinking would be to build a browser extension that lets you authenticate to your home instance, or pick up on your existing authentication, and then perform the required API calls to your home instance when interacting with posts on another instance.
But I also wonder if this couldn’t be implemented at the UI level of the default LemmyUI. I know there are some federation mechanics that need to happen before your vote/comment/post is submitted, I just don’t know if that’s something that slows this idea down or completely derails it.
Part of the frustration is this: If I send a community to someone via some normal coms (email, text, whatever), the link is going to be relative to my home instance. If they are a Lemmy user but on another instance, they’re not going to be able to vote, comment, or subscribe to the community from that link.
That interaction is what built Reddit. You send someone a link to a Reddit post, they enjoy that post, they eventually sign up for Reddit, and they start interacting with posts.
This might simply be a larger ActivityPub issue, but I have to imagine there are clever solutions to work within Lemmy’s or ActivityPub’s limitations.
That’s what made it confusing for me at first until I watched a couple of videos. I’m that type of person that googles something and adds reddit at the end and I still can’t figure out how to easily view a post from another instance using the post url.
I understand how it works for communities, but maybe there’s a simpler way for individual posts too and I don’t know about it.
The link stuff is being discussed on GitHub (lemmy-ui repo)
