Hi all,

I’d hereby like to announce lmmy.to, an instance-aware redirector for Lemmy that allows you to directly link people to Lemmy communities on their own instance.

As an example, try https://lmmy.to/c/lemmy@lemmy.ml.

I’ve created !lmmy_to@derp.foo to discuss it. There’s also a FAQ.

Edit: I’ve resolved the 500 error people were getting.

  • MentalEdgeEnglish
    10•1 year ago

    Is this really necessary with v18 having this built-in?

    • @irdcOPEnglish
      13•1 year ago

      Yes, because not every link is on Lemmy itself.

  • @trachemys@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9•1 year ago

    It would be nice if the welcome page would tell you what community it will be redirecting you too. Right now it looks like something hijacked my browser; I don’t really trust it.

    Also, I got error 500 after entering my hostname.

    And it might take some effort. But if you had a searchable select box populated with a master list of instances, that might be pretty cool.

    In the end, training everyone to make lmmy.to urls when they reference a community may be too difficult. This needs to be a builtin feature of the lemmi web ui somehow.

    • @irdcOPEnglish
      6•1 year ago

      Yeah, it needs some styling. Which is not my thing really. Anyone want to help?

      I got error 500 after entering my hostname.

      Huh, now it’s doing the same for me too. Yet it worked when I tried it before.

      Edit: fixed now. I seem to have accidentally re-introduced a bug somewhere in the process of launching the site.

    • @irdcOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Yeah, I accidentally re-introduced a bug right before launch. Should work now.

  • Arthur BesseEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    Thanks for the effort, but, unless I’m missing something, this is unnecessary because you can simply make a relative link like [this](/c/lemmy@lemmy.ml) (this) and get the same effect. Also, as of 0.18.0, a string like /c/lemmy@lemmy.ml automatically becomes a relative link, like this: /c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

    However, these relative links unfortunately don’t work on non-lemmy activitypub sites like mastodon and kbin.

    imo, despite this, for now an easy improvement that should be made is that lemmy’s autocomplete functionality (when typing !communityname...) should be changed to generate relative links.

    I haven’t followed the discussion closely but there are multiple github issues about this problem. One is here and from it you can find some others.

    • @irdcOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Nice. Would you be willing to make it always rewrite links to lmmy.to as well?

      • @Azzu@lemm.eeEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        I don’t think it makes sense to rewrite two times, why point to a link redirector if you can already point to the place the link redirector would redirect you to? What if your service is down but the actual redirect target is not?

        • @irdcOPEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          Sorry, my reply probably wasn’t entirely clear. I meant the other way around: rewrite links to lmmy.to to go to the user’s instance.

          • @Azzu@lemm.eeEnglish
            1•1 year ago

            Right :D I currently pull the list of Lemmy instances I rewrite automatically from somewhere. I could probably add lmmy.to as a special thing because it’s not really a Lemmy instance. I’ll look into it.