Custom URL scheme to open links in preferred app or instance

[SoniEx2]

Requirements

• Is this a feature request? For questions or discussions use https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy_support
• Did you check to see if this issue already exists?
• Is this only a feature request? Do not put multiple feature requests in one issue.
• Is this a backend issue? Use the lemmy-ui repo for UI / frontend issues.

Is your proposal related to a problem?

we would like fediverse links to be nicer to use and to share, not just for activitypub but for things like feeds as well. so we tried making a spec for it https://fedilinks.org/

Describe the solution you'd like.

the average implementation of fedilinks link previews is around 80 lines of code. we would like to see lemmy allow users to post fedilinks links, and generate appropriate link previews for them.

Describe alternatives you've considered.

honestly nobody else appears to be doing any work in this problem space. while there are tools like MastodonRedirect around, stuff like "you need to maually register every individual mastodon domain with your OS" is simply unacceptable, it's a workaround at best. meanwhile, fedilinks is designed to be a proper solution, taking into account existing OS capabilities and how they can be used to provide the best possible experience.

Additional context

No response

[Nutomic]

If I understand this right, its about using a url scheme like web+ap://lemmy.ml/c/memes to open links in Fediverse clients? I dont think it makes sense in that way because Mastodon clients wont be able to interact with Lemmy urls as the API is completely different, and vice versa. In fact we are planning to use a link scheme lemmy:// for this purpose. It looks like you put a lot of thought in the documentation, we will reference it for our own implementation.

[SoniEx2]

honestly web+ap is not just for mastodon, and besides, posts open fine on mastodon.

but that's not the point. it would be nice if lemmy supported web+ in posts. like, when you make a link post, you should be able to use web+ links, for example web+feed://soniex2.autistic.space/microblog.atom, including the link preview. the preview protocol is described in https://fedilinks.org/4 .

we suggest not using lemmy but rather web+lemmy if you're gonna go that way tho, as it's also more compatible with browsers.

[Nutomic]

Ah so clients should fetch the link to their local instance using .well-known/protocol-handler instead of rendering it directly. That makes sense, though we can simply use the existing /api/v3/resolve_object.

[SoniEx2]

no that's not it either. it's a generic mechanism for link previews.

[SoniEx2]

lemmy is a reddit clone where you can click a button called "Create a post" and provide a link and title. lemmy should support web+* links in this link box, and assuming it can automatically fill title and image from a link, it should use the fedilinks preview protocol to do so.

[Nutomic]

This has no adoption and is too generic for Lemmy.