Piefed finally fixes Lemmy’s ugly post URLs
Piefed now generates human-readable post URLs instead of those random ID strings. This issue has been around on Lemmy for ages with no real progress from core devs. At this point, you have to wonder what the Lemmy dev team is focusing on.
Who cares about URL legibility in 2025? 😂 Aren't you guys busy making like 7 different apps where URLs are even less visible?
I think legible URLs are nice. And app variety is nice too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The way you use the internet is called being a "reply guy" - major websites treat you as a problem to be engineered out. In addition, you can only use one app on your phone at a time.
I like shorter URLs 🤷
See the 1.0 milestone for lemmy and lemmy-ui . you can see both what they intend to do and what they already did.
Nobody really sees URLs anymore, they are always behind links, so making them more readable has basically no effect.
It's still helpful for messages. The social share/thumbnail isn't always available
A user is more likely to click on
https://unfamiliar.site/c/cats/192837/my-cat-napping-in-the-suncompared to
https://unfamiliar.site/post/192837I'm not saying that this should take priority over all the other things the developers are doing, but I'd still like to see it implemented at some point
Most places that matter (popular chat apps, text apps, social media) use Open Graph protocol to provide a preview of the link that's been sent. I don't see the issue here. Its on the site operator to implement Open Graph and it works fine on Lemmy.
Can you see this? https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]/p/1384152/piefed-finally-fixes-lemmys-ugly-post-urls
It worked in Boost, but on Lemmy UI it doesn't linkify the whole thing
You would think markdown would work, but no, these somehow have the same issue:
https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]/p/1384152/piefed-finally-fixes-lemmys-ugly-post-urls
https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]/p/1384152/piefed-finally-fixes-lemmys-ugly-post-urls
Ok we're now generating links like this instead https://piefed.social/c/politics/p/1385905/will-the-supreme-court-hand-government-contractors-blanket-immunity
That does work! What about if it's a remote community? Does it just use the post ID number to determine what instance it's actually from?
The only part of the url that actually does anything is p/1385905 which functions the same way piefed.social/post/1385905 does. So that /c/politics bit has no effect on which post is displayed and it could be any string of gibberish. There are communities called 'politics' on many instances and this url scheme doesn't differentiate between them, but I'm ok with that.
I think that's pretty standard for URL slugs
Oh, interesting. I think having a '@' in the url is going to be a problem for a lot of different software. I'll remove that part.
Maybe the @ could be replaced by "at", just for legibility and transparency? Of course, there's always URL escapes, but that's for clients to do
@[email protected] @[email protected] I get the following error when clicking this link in Mlem:
Thanks, we’ll add support for the new link format 👍
I have removed the
@now, perhaps that'll make it easier for you.I prefer them if that means anything. I prefer them readable that is.
Both URL types are available but I don't know what the default one will be or if it's already in effect.
It's not live on piefed.ca yet :)