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 [email protected] 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/[email protected] and you're greeted with this:
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):
If enough people start linking using this service, it will greatly improve the experience for Lemmy users!
Let me know what you think!
Edit: Source code is here: https://github.com/RikudouSage/lemmyverse.link
This may be more intuitive for newcomers. Matrix has something similar (matrix.to). It tells you that you want to open a chat and provides a list of apps. You can get inspiration from here.
Example: https://matrix.to/#/!matrix:matrix.org
Oh, nice! I'll do something like that.