Read this post and wrote a simple Tampermonkey script as a solution.
// ==UserScript==
// @name Fix community link
// @version 0.1
// @description try to take over the world!
// @match https://sh.itjust.works/post/*
// ==/UserScript==
(function() {
'use strict';
const postLinks = document.getElementById("postContent").querySelectorAll("a:not(.community-link)") // get every links that is NOT a community link
const fixLink = (aTags) => {
for (let aTag of aTags) {
const isCommunityLink = aTag.pathname.startsWith("/c/");
aTag.href = isCommunityLink?aTag.pathname + "@" + aTag.host:aTag.href
};
}
fixLink(postLinks)
const comments = document.getElementsByClassName("comment-content");
for (let comment of comments) {
let commentLinks = comment.querySelectorAll("a:not(.community-link)");
fixLink(commentLinks)
}
})();
Any advice? I especially hate the fact that the way to check if it's a link for lemmy community is through pathname but I thought there's can't be a real solution besides listing all the lemmy instances or actually making a request somehow.
Any inputs are welcome!
We're actually working on a browser extension for this! It currently supports both communities and posts
We ran into the same issue, federated sites are hard to work with. Right now, the extension has it so that a user needs to right click on a link to be redirected. That way the user can choose which links get redirected, and there's no chance of accidentally redirecting the wrong thing.
There are other solutions (using the API for example), but they seemed to slow the browser down too much. Another proposed feature that hasn't been implemented yet was to redirect when holding down a key (when holding down "r", try to redirect the link).
Feel free to take a look, try it, and you can totally contribute code. It's all open source and we've tried to keep the code simple and easy to verify/contribute.
I am not that familiar with browser extensions dev enough to contribute rn but that looks awesome. If there's any chance, I'll definitely contribute!
Sounds good! This was my first dive into browser extensions as well. It's not too bad once you go over the basics. If you give it a try, see the contributing page on the repo's wiki for some resources on how to get started with browser extensions.
A super short summary is:
- manifest.json is the entry point, it links to HTML files (which represent things like the popup, sidebar) and scripts (which do most of the work)
- the background script runs all the time (see background.js), and the content scripts run on specific pages (ex. There's one for Lemmy community pages, one for error pages)
If you DO give it a try, we were part way through migrating features from the LemmyTools userscript and that might be a good place to start. I wasn't familiar with userscripts so I didn't make much progress, and can't get back to it for a little while. The issues page of the repo should have LemmyTools related features tagged. If any details are missing, let me know and I'll add them in :)
I just posted this on the post you linked, but yeah I am hardcoding a list of instances into my solution. Here's my comment, copied:
I'm using the Firefox addon Redirector, and one of my rules there redirects community links using regex. I keep adding to the pattern as I encounter more instances. Currently it's:
Pattern: https://(lemdro\.id|lemmy\.run|beehaw\.org|lemmy\.ml|sh\.itjust\.works|lemmy\.fmhy\.ml|lemmy\.dbzer0\.com|lemmy\.world|sopuli\.xyz|lemmy\.kde\.social|lemmygrad\.ml|mander\.xyz|lemmy\.ca|zerobytes\.monster)/c/(.*)Redirect to: https://programming.dev/c/$2@$1Never use regex on URLs, they're not enough to properly do the job, you have the perfect, fast and correct URL parser already in your browser or your node binary, you need to use it, make a list of hostnames and use the browser's URL api to extract hostnames then match against the list
Can you provide an example URL that breaks this solution?
Oh man I was hoping you'd ask because URLs are way worse than people imagine and that's still not even a tenth of what emails can do
HtTpS://user:pw@lemdro.id:443 is a valid url to lemdro.id and should match but will not
Http://maliciouswebsite.to/?q=http://lemdro.id will match but should not
To give you an idea of how bad this is I suggest anyone tell me if their lemmy app parsed those properly because Thunder treats the 1st one as an email and Jerboa thinks both are URLs
You also have the instances that have a valid address with www in front of them for old school internet habits, there's urls that can have quotes in them, urls with chinese characters or russian characters that are both valid in their encoding but have a canonical form in ASCII
It's a mess, and the correct way to do this is still faster than your regex in the end which is crazy
HtTpS://user:pw@lemdro.id:443 is a valid url to lemdro.id and should match but will not
Well that one:
- technically shouldn't match, because it's not a community URL
- is not the form I expect and want to be using for this case
- may actually work (if it were a real community link, which again, it's not), because after authentication I think the browser strips the credentials
Http://maliciouswebsite.to/?q=http://lemdro.id will match but should not
No, it does not match.
AFAICT, this solution is working properly, but if you can find a URL that breaks it, please let me know.
Lmao ah yes, one of those
If you're not convinced with this you never will
You can just wrap your var with "new URL()" and have something faster, correct and easier to read, but I'm guessing you'll change your ways silently in a few years when you've forgotten about this interaction and managed to convince yourself it was your own idea!
Until then i guess you can add /c/whatev at the end of my two examples and find something else to criticize and decide not to support
I'm not trying to be combative, I'm trying to understand. I'd like to see the failure in action so I can appreciate and pursue the proposed solution.
But when I added the community bit to the first URL, the browser resolved it and stripped the credentials, so the resulting URL matched. But the example credentials weren't real so it's not a great test; if there's an real example I can test, please share it. Though I don't see why I'd auth to an instance just to view it from a different instance.
When I added the community bit to the second URL, it was not a match, as it shouldn't be. The pattern must match the entire URL.
You can find it in action on regex101 with the regex indeed matching the query string in the maliciouswebsite and not matching even just something with the port and no user/password
It is valid (just weird & not recommended) to give a user:pw combo to a website that doesn't ask for one in the headers. Browsers stripping it off is a different thing
The sheer number of things you have to take into account to properly parse a URL should convince you to not use regexes for it
The fact that it's less code, more correct, faster and more readable to use new URL() should also be enough to convince you to not use regexes
@Andy @BeanCounter Given how many of these start with "Lemmy" you could simplify this to:
https://(lemmy\\.(?:run|(?:fmhy\\.)?ml|dbzer0\\.com|world|kde\\.social|ca)|lemmygrad\\.ml|lemdro\\.id|beehaw\\.org|sh\\.itjust\\.works|(?:sopuli|mander)\\.xyz|zerobytes\\.monster)/c/(.\*)Or just assume that anything matching
https://(lemmy\\.[^/]+)/c/(.\*)is a Lemmy server, which will probably be correct.Edit: some kind of interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy has doubled all my backslashes. That is not intentional.
Interesting idea. I'm currently working on a Lemmy-ui fork for my instance and including a feature of this kind in the frontend would be kinda nice.
I'll bookmark this and come back if I ever get to it.
You could check if a domain contains a lemmy instance by fetching
/.well-known/nodeinfo, but it's bad netiquette to hammer sites with requests and could get users blocked. If you were to do it I'd make sure it cached the lookups in IndexedDB, localStorage or just using Cache API. I'm unsure how well any of the APIs works with UserScripts."Try to take over the world" sounds a bit evil, you might wanna try something like "Improve lemmy for the betterment of mankind"
