I can share the link of a post like https://lemmy.world/post/58535 but if I change the domain to lemmy.ml it links to a different post.
I understand that the post Id is local but, is there a way to generate a global link that contains the information about the server, community and post?
I think it will be useful to make mirror sites, index in Google, addons to redirect to your Lemmy server…
Part of the idea behind federation is that by only accessing content through your specific instance, you actually reduce the load on the instance you’re browsing to, because your specific instance federates (essentially “caches”) a local copy of the remote content. So by trying to obtain a direct “global” link to the original you’re bypassing a lot of the natural load sharing and that is inherently undesirable for very large instances like lemmy.ml is becoming. As long as federation is working smoothly, you are losing no inherent information about the post by sharing a link to the post from your lemmy.world instance vs lemmy.one, lemmy.ml, or any other instance, whether the post is original to that instance or no.
Besides, the information about the “server/community/post” is sort of baked into Lemmy’s UI with how it defines locations within Lemmy (eg. Technology@beehaw.org, tells you right off the bat the community is on the Beehaw instance, same for users). That’s just down to user’s learning knowledge about how the Lemmy system is laid out and displayed in the UI.
What about if I want to link to a post that will work for the local instance?
For example, @huojtkeg@lemmy.world posted above that https://lemmy.world/post/58535 is his instance link, and https://lemmy.ml/post/1205894 is the link from lemmy.ml. Neither of which allow me to comment directly.
Is there linking method that says
Give me the link for post #X on instance Y, but give me the link on the viewing instance?ahh. I see what he means. You want to convert a generic link from a remote instance to your home viewing instance.
No way exists to do that right now, AFAIK. You would have to search for the community from your local instance, get into that, and search for the post. Another bit of a pain point for lemmy’s growth… if you can’t even link to other Lemmy posts efficiently.
Balance the load across multiple instances is fine. I don’t want the permalink to access the lemmy.ml domain always, it is just in case something happens to the instance lemmy.ml, it will me much easier to replace the domain in my bookmarks.
My feeling is that nobody is thinking about long term storage/search/archival. Lemmy/Reddit is a forum for me and I like to bookmark some posts and revisit them from time to time. In the next months many instances will shut down, accounts, posts, links… will be lost. Having universal URIs is a must and hving some kind of tool to migrate users across servers too.