Due to the federated nature of Lemmy there’s one small problem: if you link to a community (let’s say https://lemmings.world/c/wwdits) the link takes people out of their instance.

On Lemmy it can be solved easily - use !wwdits@lemmings.world and the community opens on their own instance.

But the problem still exists outside Lemmy, let’s say you write a blog post and link to some community - people who already use Lemmy will again be taken out of their instance.

And to solve this I created this project, available on https://lemmyverse.link and https://threadiverse.link (both are the exact same app).

Instead of https://lemmings.world/c/wwdits you link to https://lemmyverse.link/c/wwdits@lemmings.world and you’re greeted with this:

A page letting you choose whether you want to continue to the link or set your home instance first

You can either continue directly if you don’t care, or you can set your home instance and afterwards every link at https://lemmyverse.link will automatically be redirected to your preferred instance (with a small countdown allowing you to change your instance):

A page with a redirect to the target community

If enough people start linking using this service, it will greatly improve the experience for Lemmy users!

Let me know what you think!

Source code is here: https://github.com/RikudouSage/lemmyverse.link