How to open a particular POST on a different instance?

EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zone to

Lemmy@lemmy.ml – 20 points – 5 months ago

Hello.

I'm extremely tired, so it very well could be that this is extremely simple and I'm just not getting it. However, what I would like to know is how to open a post from a community on one instance on another instance.

For example, here's a recent post from !asklemmy@lemmy.ml. I know that to open that community in the instance lemmy.blahaj.zone, I would merely type into the address bar

lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

However, how would I open that particular post in that community on the latter instance? Is it even possible?

Cheers.

P.S.

I did do some searching on both this community as well as the Reddit Lemmy FAQ page but I didn't find anything. However, I could've missed something. If it's something obvious, I apologize in advance.

Edit: Assuming I understand what people are saying, well, evidently, it seems to be a current limitation of the ActivityPub protocol. Perhaps that will change one day. Hopefully soon. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If it's what I think you're asking, you would go to the instance that you want to open the post on and do a search for that title, with the search type as "posts". The instance you're on has to look it up because everything isn't automatically on another instance. Also, both instances have to be federated to each other. I personally, haven't had good luck by doing the generic address way of posting.

The parent's text in visual form:

I agree with @pelespirit@sh.itjust.works; thank you for this. :)

Thanks for doing that, it probably was confusing the way I described it.

Yea I think this is the correct answer.

I don’t know for sure, but I think this question has come up before, maybe written up as an issue on GitHub (worth a check).

Essentially, I think it is a missing feature at the moment. And same goes for comments.

The solution would probably be that all content is stored in the DB along with its original address and its current address on the instance it’s being viewed from. I’m betting that wasn’t done from the beginning and so to add it would require a schema update. I’m not sure I see any reason why it’d be too hard to add. Might be a good feature for a community member to add if they’re up to it.

Thanks for explaining all this. Sounds fascinating to me. I do appreciate you going out of your way to do that. :)

No worries!

I am just guessing here though.

Wow. Seriously, that is a...pretty massive hole in feature-set for a link-sharing platform. And I say that lovingly toward Lemmy.

When they get the kinks worked out and people spread throughout all of the instances, Lemmy is going to be great for everyone.

I mean, I expect kinks. That's a natural part of the nature of what the fediverse is right now. I just think this is a pretty glaring gap; I hesitate to call it a "basic feature", but I'd say it's close... :/

Fair point, I agree.

Most apps handle it internally, but if you're on the web browser you can use the Instance Assistant extension to do it for you. It adds a little "open post in home instance" button

Instance Assistant

Nice! Installed!

Thanks. :) Kind of makes me think of a Reddit Enhancement Suite–type app but for ActivityPub. Haha.

The short answer is that you have to ask blahaj.zone to resolve it. lemmy.ml has it as post id 11470168, but it'll be different for other instances - whatever the next number was in their database when the post was announced.

You get different answers depending on whether you're logged in or not though.
From endlesstalk.org, I can search for that post in the web-ui: Communities -> paste the post url into Search -> Change the Type from 'communities' to 'posts'
Alternatively, using the API, I can resolve it with
curl --header 'accept: application/json' --header 'authorization: Bearer MY_LOGIN_TOKEN' https://endlesstalk.org/api/v3/resolve_object?q=https://lemmy.ml/post/11470168

I'm not logged into blahaj.zone though, so it won't resolve it. The web-ui only gives me this post as one that mentions the thing I'm searching for, and the API returns 'not found'

I understand. I wasn't sure if it was something that was already possible and I just didn't get it (again, because I'm tired as balls), or if it was a problem with my instance, or hell even a limitation of the ActivityPub protocol itself. If I knew it was the instance, I would have posted for sure there instead. Although judging from others' comments here, it seems the issue really is an ActivityPub limitation.

Drop the permaurl/fedilink into your own instance's search box. Note that you have to be logged in when searching for remote content otherwise it'll silently find nothing, probably to avoid abuse of server resources.

And pull request with the fix https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/2344 (give a thumbs up or comment if you want to see this fix accepted)

Basically if the colorful fedilink icon is not there then you can just copy the URL from your address bar cause you're already on the local post. Posts are local to the instance of the poster, not the instance of the community.

Here's a couple of feature requests filed for improving the core issue: (give them thumbs ups)

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2318

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2987

This was all genuinely very fascinating, but now I'm embarrassed because I don't know what a fedilink is. xD

@EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted @Die4Ever I think of a "fedilink" as the canonical URL where the post/comment/toot/video/etc. can be found.
From Lemmy server lemmy.sdf.org: https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/8082033
From hachyderm.io (running Mastodon): https://hachyderm.io/statuses/111886790514615908
Each of those servers loaded your comment from https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/6238380 (this is the fedilink!)

So the fedilink is the link to the original post on the original instance?

@EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted @lemmy Yes exactly :)

Thanks for explaining that!

this colorful icon is the fedilink, the original URL of the post/comment