Quite some time ago I’ve posted about the tool, back then it only supported linking to communities, now it supports users and posts as well.
So what is this?
This is a service that’s great for linking to Lemmy posts/users/communities in an instance-agnostic way.
What’s the problem?
When you link to a community (user, post) using its URL, the users are taken to your instance instead of their own.
With this tool, you can wrap them in a lemmyverse.link link that offers them to set their home instance (or ignore it and go straight to the user/community/post).
Some examples
- https://lemmyverse.link/c/lemmings_world_instance@lemmings.world - a link to community for announcements of my instance
- https://lemmyverse.link/u/rikudou@lemmings.world - a link to my Lemmy profile
- https://lemmyverse.link/lemmings.world/post/1676591 - link to a new user’s guide I’ve written recently
Note that some of those problems have a solution when you’re linking to content in Lemmy, for example the community can be linked like this: !lemmings_world_instance@lemmings.world and almost all clients support it. The 2nd link can be handled like this: @rikudou@lemmings.world - this format is notably not supported by the default Lemmy UI. To my knowledge, the 3rd link currently doesn’t have any widespread equivalent solution (though some apps may support handling such cases). But without a tool like this one, you can’t comfortably link to Lemmy content from outside of Lemmy (like in an article, blog post etc.)
On the homepage you will find a generator where you can simply paste the URL and it will generate a link for you.
You can also set 3rd party frontends as your target instance, for example
a.lemmings.worldfor Alexandrite hosted on Lemmings.world orphoton.lemmy.worldhosted on Lemmy.world.
You can also access the tool at https://threadiverse.link
So is this a bit.ly-type url shortener?
Not really, it doesn’t shorten the URL. I’m on lemmings.world, let’s say someone is on sh.itjust.works, I post a link to my profile: https://lemmings.world/u/rikudou. When the person on sh.itjust.works opens it, they can’t interact with it, they have to copy the URL and search for it on their instance. If I instead post a link to the service (https://lemmyverse.link/u/rikudou@lemmings.world), they can set their preferred instance as sh.itjust.works and every time they click on any link from the service, they’ll be redirected correctly.
Same for communities and posts.