What's the correct way to link to a community on a different instance?

Square Singer@feddit.de to Technology@beehaw.org – 27 points –

Say I want to link to community x on instance y.org. How do I post this so that someone from instance z.org will end up at z.com/c/x@y.org, but someone from a.org ends up on a.com/c/x@y.org?

19

The best way is to use relative links, such as !technology@beehaw.org

What I did there was simply [!technology@beehaw.org](/c/technology@beehaw.org). This link doesn't start with the protocol and site, but instead assumes the current site, and starts with /c/my_comunity@my_site.tld, meaning it will be routed to the same instance.

This will probably not work for those on Kbin, since their communities (magazines) don't start with /c/, but rather with /m/. If anyone knows a good way for this to work for both, I'd be glad to adopt that myself going forward.

In my phone, for some reason, Jerboa crashes when I tap your link.

That's a known bug in Jerboa. It's already been reported and the dev acknowledged it.

With Lemmy it's !technology@beehaw.org
From kbin it's the same but with an @. @technology (@technology@ beehaw.org)
IDK how others have search set up. There may not be a way

I'm not sure that's correct. When I click your first link, it's going to https://kbin.social/m/!technology@beehaw.org. What OP wants is a way to post the link and (in my case) go to https://melly.0x-ia.moe/c/technology@beehaw.org

Did you mean to link that specifically to kbin?

No. Just an example, but I used this sub after editing my comment

Well from what it looks like, on my instance, is that your !technology@beehaw.org is linking to https://kbin.social/m/!technology@beehaw.org.

I think what OP is after, is a way to make it link to the reader's own instanced version of technology@beehaw.org

I was under the impression that the exclamation mark was designed to do exactly that: take everything after the ! and interpret the community@instance.example into whatever the user's instance uses for links (m for kbin, c for lemmy).

Some day there will be a standard link style... for now it seems like a huge mess :'D The ! doesn't work on kbin (for me, at least), nor do links with c/ where we use m/, but the @-link does, which is neat considering I'd not found any short link style that did until seeing that one :'D Seems like others think the !-link is the thing to do, some give absolute links, some try other things besides. Growing pains, teething issues... might as well say "wheee" while the ride's still bumpy ^.^

I did some investigation into this in https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/199, but stopped short of actually fixing it or spinning up an instance to investigate further, as just didn't really have the time and energy (and haven't yet).

Fixing the ! links probably isn't too hard, but I'm not one to try anything without being able to run it. And really there should be an alias for /c/. I haven't used Symfony so can't tell if it's as easy as I hoped. I've had countless times where I thought something would be easy but it turned out hard and vice versa...

Took this from the sidebar at newcommunities

[link text](/c/community@instance.com)

This provides a link that should work across instances, but in some cases it won’t

To my knowledge this doesn't work if a user in your instance hasn't previously searched for the community