@amanaftermidnight
I think we need some way to paste a URL from any instance into a comment that when rendered on any user’s page (whoever is reading it, on any instance) will link to:

• if the item already exists locally: the user’s local version of the item
• if the item does not exist locally: the prefilled search page to go find the post

The person who is writing the comment should have a low-BS way of indicating this is what they want to do.

The easiest way I think would be to use the whole URL prefixed by something. Not a ! because that already has a different meaning. I was thinking of something like /local/ or abbreviated to /l/ because special characters aren’t as easily available on all keyboards, they already do other things etc.

If I wanted to link to this current thread I would do it like this:

/l/https://kbin.social/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/313780/link-for-posts

I am thinking that when my kbin instance sees that, it would be triggered to locate “the fediverse url” for the post, which it already has available on anything it displays. In this case it would be https://lemmy.nz/post/825037. It would remove the kbin.social URL and replace it with the lemmy.nz URL. So then when it comes to rendering on any other instance, that instance will have the “real” location to work with.

if interested, here is a thread/xpost which elaborates a bit more on the current situations and both have good comments. I got talked out of the idea of a UUID in favor of something like the above.

Though I think there would be all kinds of complex use cases to work out. Like I don’t only want to be able to do this for URLs that are on kbin.social, so there would be extra work in that case and I don’t know enough (anything) about the internals to suggest how that could happen.

@luthis @instance @willya