1d ago

I have an idea for to prevent broken links from Lemmy instances that shutting down

There will be a lot of lemm.ee/p/123 links around. As far as I understand, any server that federated with lemm.ee (e.g. lemmy.world) will continue to host the federated communities and posts forever.

So here's my proposal. We build a simple tool that says, when you visit lemm.ee/p/123, we check if that post exists on lemmy.world and forward you there. Doesn't necessarily have to be lemmy.world. We could even present the user with multiple instances to resolve the post from.

If you're interested in how this would work, it would utilize the resolve_object endpoint, which both Lemmy and PieFed implement.

Here are some examples of how you can still look up lemm.ee posts via the API of other instances:

For this to really work smoothly, whoever owns the domains of the shut down instances would have to host this tool (e.g. lemm.ee would have to host it at lemm.ee). I have no idea how to get in touch with whoever owns the domain, but I would be happy to help build this.

3 comments

@moseschrute That could also be done at the client level
- Yeah absolutely! But it does feel more useful to have it live on the domain if possible.
  I run my own Lemmy/PieFed client. I'm trying to think if there is a way to tell if an instance has shut down without hard coding a list. The hard part imo is telling if an instance is shut down vs temporarily down.
  Though as I write this, I suppose this same feature could be used to resolve a post if an instance is temporarily down. So maybe I just ping /nodeinfo/2.1 and if it times out, I redirect.