this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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Lemmy
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No, I'm pretty sure that's a quirk of how the fediverse works. Posts, comments, etc are in two places:
You'll want the first (the permalink) for general posting, and the second for your own use. However, lemmy doesn't handle the first very well, so both options kinda suck.
I honestly don't think there's a good solution to this. We can make improvements though, such as lemmy figuring out that a link is a lemmy link, either through special syntax (like @user@instance or !community@instance) or checking a list of known instances, but the real problem is that users need to be aware of instances, and that's poor UX imo.
I'm working on an alternative to lemmy that solves this (and has a bunch of other drawbacks that I hope are acceptable), but I hope it's not necessary and someone more clever than me can solve it.
If the comments/posts were just numbered relative to their communities instead of generated by each instance, there wouldn't have to be this disconnect at all.
/c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/18177167
Would be THE instance-agnostic link for that post, and
/c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/9620373
THE instance-agnostic link for that comment.
Don't even have to redo how the instances generate content numbers for posts/comments generated locally, but set them to pull such numbers in for each post/comment mirrored from another instance. Not even slightly hard to come up with, though I don't have my laptop with me so I'll refrain from speaking one the difficulty of implimentation versus all the "legacy-numbered" content already out there.
I think the asynchronous way lemmy handles creating a comment/post and then sending it would make this difficult.
An entirely acceptable answer to both my original question and my suggestion, although I had already attempted to address that. Every instance generating their own, seemingly non-random*, numbers for every post and comment was a big reason my mind skipped to "insanity" for my title - can we say "does not, SHOULD not, scale" any louder? Thanks again.
*
spoiler
Looking at the comment links in the OP cross-referenced with entries on lemmyverse.net, discuss.tchncs.de and lemmy.dbzer0.com have similar user numbers, both an order of magnitude larger(as large? anyways...) than jlai.lu ... the reason jlai.lu's comment numbers has got so high, about one-half instead of one-tenth as the user numbers might suggest, probably boils down to those users being subscribed to a large number of communities, but still not so many as the users of the other two servers. Run that up against the fact that there are fewer communities than users, anywhere, et viola!That concludes this episode of my conjectural bullshit. Thanks for watching.