Due to the federated nature of Lemmy there's one small problem: if you link to a community (let's say https://lemmings.world/c/wwdits) the link takes people out of their instance.
On Lemmy it can be solved easily - use !wwdits@lemmings.world and the community opens on their own instance.
But the problem still exists outside Lemmy, let's say you write a blog post and link to some community - people who already use Lemmy will again be taken out of their instance.
And to solve this I created this project, available on https://lemmyverse.link and https://threadiverse.link (both are the exact same app).
Instead of https://lemmings.world/c/wwdits you link to https://lemmyverse.link/c/wwdits@lemmings.world and you're greeted with this:
You can either continue directly if you don't care, or you can set your home instance and afterwards every link at https://lemmyverse.link will automatically be redirected to your preferred instance (with a small countdown allowing you to change your instance):
If enough people start linking using this service, it will greatly improve the experience for Lemmy users!
Let me know what you think!
Edit: Source code is here: https://github.com/RikudouSage/lemmyverse.link
lmao… after this response to criticism, I definitely don’t want to trust any “service” you create.
Anyone can host an open-source URL shortener for their own links. How many people do? If something like this ever takes off, it will have to be centralized due to the nature of the product. And that adds extra bottlenecks for the community.
Despite instances being down the fediverse is fine. The content that was created by users on these instances was already federated to other instances so we didn’t lose it. You can’t go back and change links the same way. You’re not federating. You’re handing out code for running individual centralised servers. That’s why I said that this is opposed to federation.
You seem to have overlooked a really important insight about your own project. Who has preferred Lemmy instances? People who already have Lemmy accounts!! If someone doesn’t have a preference, this service is a useless extra hop.
Lemmy users can voluntarily install browser extensions to improve their own experience. Lemmy apps can claim domains so that at least common lemmy instances are recognised. This is true freedom and convenience without being beholden to a third-party website.
I feel like you implemented the first idea that came to your mind and now you are just defending the project instead of trying to see the bigger picture.