Open Lemmy links in current instance, not forced to switch instances
Open Lemmy links in current instance, not forced to switch instances
I love the app so far but I am having trouble with opening Lemmy links from other instances. When someone links to say a Lemmy.world post, I am hit with a window saying I have to have a Lemmy.world account in order to vote and such. This is incredibly inconvenient, I don't know how voyager does it but voyager just lets me view the post and vote/etc. in my instance without forcing me to change accounts. Anyway to get rid of this behavior so it is more like voyager? I want other Lemmy links to be opened in my instance so I can vote and such.
Also unrelated but just now I was unable to upload a picture from summit and had to switch apps to upload the photo.
Not even the official Lemmy app can do that. I don't know how Voyager does it, but afaik there is no straightforward way to get to the same post on a different instance. I'm curious, if someone can tell me! (And save me having to decipher it from the source code)
There is a way and Summit supports it. The answer is in the UI dialog although if I can communicate it more clearly please let me know. The
change instancebutton will open the post in the instance of the current user. In this case it will open the lemmy.world post in the lemmy.dbzer0.com instance.
If you tap
Change Instanceit should find the post you are on on your account's instance. Eg. let's say your account is on thelemmy.dbzer0.cominstance and you open alemmy.worldlink. You will not be able to perform any actions by default because you are not authenticated (signed in) onlemmy.world.However this dialog should popup when you try to perform an action giving you the option to change your instance from
lemmy.world(which is the current instance since that's the instance of the link you tapped) to the instance of your accountlemmy.dbzer0.com.This might be a communication error on my part as I might not have been clear enough in that dialog. If you can think of a better way to phrase the message or the buttons let me know.
I should also explain the design choice here.
The reason why it's not done automatically is to preserve the intent of the link. Eg. let's say you tap on a link to a post P and that post has comments A and B on it, but comment A and B only appears on lemmy.world. Then if the instance switch occurred automatically, you will only see the post without comments A and B. This can change the intent of the link.
Eg. imagine the following scenario. A user posts "how do I unclog my drain", another user comments "I found this post with some helpful answers". The first user then taps the link but the link auto opens in that user's instance which just happens to not have any of the comments. The user is then confused how the post is helpful.
I can add a feature to auto-open link in the current account's instance but I will make it default to off.
Sorry for the long wait for my response, I was preoccupied at the time.
I tried tapping on change instance but it seemed to not work immediately, I had to tap on it a few times while trying to vote which is why I initially thought I needed to change accounts and there was some sort of error since the dialog kept reappearing. I did get a vote in after tapping on change instance a few times but it didn't show I upvoted (it did not make the upvoted button orange, it left it the same color as if I hadn't interacted with it), just showed the vote count change.
I think a good compromise is your suggestion to have a toggle for auto-open link set to off by default so I can have it on and replicate what I saw voyager doing.
I think the buttons could also say something like "view in my instance" (Lemmy.dbzer0) and "view in original instance" (Lemmy.world). That might make it clearer to someone like me.