Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

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Lemmy URLs should be human-meaningful (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 years ago by cypherpunks@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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I just posted this in a comment here: https://lemmy.ml/post/112460/comment/110439 (link goes to the "What are your most wanted Lemmy features?" post in the "lemmy" community)

I am following up now with this new post, because I just found https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/875 (link goes to the "Community name in post URL" issue on the lemmy project's github, under the LemmyNet organization... note github has 2 of those 3 pieces of information in their URL) where I learned that @dessalines@lemmy.ml has actually thought about this and arrived at (imo) the wrong conclusion. Afaict, they have decided that having human-meaningful in URLs is "silly" and therefore we shouldn't?!

I am hoping they'll change their mind!

I think having no idea what a URL is about makes for a really lousy user experience. When people send me lemmy links, I want to have a clue as to what they're about before I decide to click it. Maybe I've seen it before. Maybe it's a meme, and I want to look at it later. Or maybe it's the answer to a question I urgently need to know the answer to. So, I have to click to find out - often to discover it is just a meme i've seen 3 times already.

Having the community name and the post title in the URL would make my lemmy experience much better.

In my opinion, there is no benefit to lemmy URLs being short except for in the rare case that you need to transmit one verbally or on paper. But, in that case, you can actually just omit the post title when copying the URL, as there would still be a database ID preceding it! (Try it with a reddit URL: if you remove the title slug and just supply the database ID, it redirects you to the post's canonical URL with the slug in it.)

Lemmy devs: please reconsider this!

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[–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 children)

On github I see @nutomic@lemmy.ml said "If we make this change, we should do it before releasing federation. After that it will get much harder to change the URLs." - I haven't looked closely at the data model but I'm optimistic that a graceful upgrade to a better URL format should not be a problem. Eg, this post is currently https://lemmy.ml/post/152773 and in my ideal world in the future that old-format URL would continue working but become a redirect to a canonical URL such as https://lemmy.ml/post/152773/lemmy/Lemmy_URLs_should_be_human_meaningful or https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy/152773/Lemmy_URLs_should_be_human_meaningful

Really the /c/ and/or /post/ parts shouldn't be necessary; could just be https://lemmy.ml/lemmy/152773/Lemmy_URLs_should_be_human_meaningful

[–] gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml -2 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 children)

I think it's better to keeep the /c/communityaddress part so that only with reading the URL you can know where the discussion is taking place, also posts could be displayed with /p/ following how everything else is being displayed /c/, /u/. but I agree with you. It would be much better.

https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy/p/Lemmy_URLs_should_be_human_meaningful

Beautiful.

[–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 years ago (1 children)

That is a nice URL, but it omits any database ID, which means that you couldn't have two posts with the same title. Also, you would need a more expensive database lookup to serve the URL. For wikis and blogs, I think using the post title as the unique key makes sense, but I don't think that actually makes sense for lemmy.

[–] gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml -2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Mmm, I see your point now. what about something like:

https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy/p/XYZ123/Lemmy_URLs_should_be_human_meaningful

[–] edward@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 children)

https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy/post/XYZ123 as the canonical url would be best IMO. Then the title following can be optional. But post instead of p seems like a good idea, not too much longer, but helps readability. c instead of community is fine because 1) community is kinda long and 2) the single letter prefix for communities is pretty well established by reddit and among all of its clones.

Edit: comments would then be https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy/post/XYZ123/comment/ABC456. Really just take the current address and add the community name. Plus the title as an optional path segment for readability.

[–] gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml -2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Well, that is the exact opposite of what OP thinks, since it's not human meaningful if title is optional. Also I don't see the reason why /post/ helps with readability more than /p/.

[–] edward@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 children)

Adding the community name is a big help, and like I said, the post title can be there but not canonical. https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy/post/152773/Lemmy_URLs_should_be_human-meaningful would work just as well as https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy/post/152773.

But purely title based URLs is a really bad idea. Multiple posts can have the same title.

Also I don’t see the reason why /post/ helps with readability more than /p/.

Just nicer tbh.

[–] gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml -2 points 3 years ago

Ahh, I get your point, I think it could redirect by default to the human readable one but if one where to delete to only the ID should also work. Yeah, I understand the only title based URL part.

I disagree on being nicer, since it makes the URL larger and it does not follow the same pattern as everything else, but let's agree on disagree on that part.