I guess I’m glad I was never a big Twat, so Bluesky wasn’t a place of refuge for me the way Lemmy was when Reddit went off the rails.
I guess I’m glad I was never a big Twat, so Bluesky wasn’t a place of refuge for me the way Lemmy was when Reddit went off the rails.
And then on top of that you find a random Mastodon link in the wild, click it, a Mastodon instance loads, but you can’t reply/toot/do anything, because it’s not your instance and you’re not signed in. I still don’t know how to “convert” a link to my own instance (granted, I haven’t looked into that much really).
There must be some sort of way to do it.
Lemmy doesn’t handle this nicely either, though I still use this extension last updated 3 years ago: https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant
If you’re the one posting a link, you can use a service like https://lemmyverse.link/ which will redirect a user to the same items on their own instance (after they set their instance the first time), though that site is run by the guy behind lemmings.world that’s shutting down in a couple of months, so it’s future may be a little uncertain. I’ve also seen https://threadiverse.link/ but I don’t know who run it.
Right, so it’s all “this might work, or it might not, or might die in a bit” - it’s chaos. It should be a native feature of the fediverse to auto-redirect to your instance.
I guess the question is… how? Browsers isolate what they know about you to domains. When you go to Gmail, it doesn’t tell Gmail that you have a Hotmail email.
As far as the browser knows, lemmy.world and lemmy.ca are as different as hotmail.com and gmail.com. The token that knows you are logged into lemmy.world is not sent to any other site, that would be a huge security risk. And the browser doesn’t know what is being stored in the cookies, just that it’s there and it should only send it to the domain it came from and never another.
I don’t disagree that this is a big problem. I just don’t know how it would be solved while keeping the fediverse decentralised.
That’s one of the many fundamental design shortcomings of the Fediverse.
But, in this particular case, the “how” could be a simple “redirect to a different instance” button, where you could select yours. Or the site could check for the cookies of known servers and check if one has a valid login token, and automatically redirect there.
Though not perfect, that would be a vast improvement on now. There are thousands of instances (remembering content is shared to Mastodon and others), and not every instance knows about every other, but you could auto-fill from the list the instance knows about, and if you end up back on that site it should remember what you selected last time and prefill it. Great idea!
This is simply not possible because browsers don’t let a site do this.