Instance Assistant for Lemmy and Kbin

I just submitted a large update to both Firefox and Chrome web stores. Once it goes through review, you will be able to update to the new version. I'll make more posts to spread the word after that process is done.

So how is this different from other similar extensions?

You may have noticed the extension's name changed to be more generic (and include Kbin 🥳). I'm trying to make this a more well-rounded extension, and that means I've incorporated some features from the other extensions, in my own way.

Lemmy Links, Kbin Links, and the other forks:

This is a great extension that replaces links on your page with versions that go to your home instance. However, in order for this to work, it needs to recursively check every element on your page whenever DOM content (say, the code the browser is reading) changes. This is somewhat resource intensive, and while testing I ran into lag and freezing issues. As such, I decided to not include this functionality in the same way.

Instead, I've added a right click context menu that does the same thing. This way the user can pick which links they want the code to run on, and it's a lot more efficient resource wise. While it's an extra click, I felt this was a reasonable compromise. However I'm open to feedback!

Lemmy Home Instance Helper

This is another extension which checks if you are logged in to an instance, and it creates a button to the search page.

As this extension is creating a button on any foreign instance linking to the community page, the situation where this would be helpful is when a community hasn't been loaded into your home instance yet (ex. because you're the first one to try accessing it). What I've done instead is create a section that appears on such "Community not found" pages with more instructions on how you can start the loading/fetching process, as well as buttons to trigger the search or to open the community elsewhere. Again, open to feedback!

As always, I'd love to collaborate with other people while building this. I'm cleaning up my code, but feel free to look at the GitHub. If this extension is popular, I will definitely need help for translations and for things like getting the extension on Safari (I don't have a recent Apple device to sign the extension with).

Summary of Changes:

• Added support for Kbin
• Fixed issue where button wouldn't load when navigating to a community within Lemmy (fix is only on Firefox version for now).
• (NEW) Right-click context menu on Lemmy/Kbin community links to let you open them directly. You can test them out here: https://lemmy.ca/post/1282303. This is also only on Firefox for now.
• (NEW) Information and buttons added to "Community Not Found" error pages to let you fetch the community or open it elsewhere.
• Updates to sidebar button to state the current selected instance and provide more detailed instructions as a dropdownList
• Refactored the code to remove more unnecessary permissions.
• Another pile of bugfixes, UI improvements, and better wording for instructions.

Future Plans:

• Bringing over the new changes to Google Chrome. Since chrome requires Manifest 3, I still need to iron out some issues with the service workers. The missing features are all related to the background processes that are running on the Firefox version.
• Pushing to other browsers. Microsoft Edge needs some more testing, and I'm looking into other browsers. Unfortunately, I don't have a device that can sign the extension for Safari, so I will need some help to port that over. There are tools available for that, so it shouldn't be too hard :)
• Setting up a proper Settings page to allow users to turn off features that they don't like
• Either fixing the options page, or removing it entirely
• Finishing the setup so that people can contribute translations / other languages to the extension.
• Adding an option to save your own instances to the popup, for those that have multiple home instances.