The frontends and apps do redirect embedded links in comments no? E.g. if you click this it should automatically use your instance to find the comment (even though its a link to my instance): https://sopuli.xyz/comment/17606535

No that link opens in your instance for me like a vanilla hyperlink, I’ve used several instances all with Lemmy’s default web front end and that’s always been the behaviour in my experience, maybe some apps do it differently? If it did it automatically wouldn’t the software have to have hard-coded knowledge of every other instance to know whether to handle it as a Lemmy link or somewhere else on the web?

That’s useful thanks for sharing.

It feels like there should be something like that built into Lemmy and I was a bit surprised there isn’t, just like how you can link to a community for example with [email protected]

It just means that the decision comes down to the instance owner not the software developer, which I think is right. Everyone should be able to decide what their computer does, that’s important to hold on to.

It wouldn’t be a free software licence by the FSF definition (rule zero). Of interest the FSF rejects the original JSON licence because it contains the clause “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.” Since Mastodon uses AGPL, it wouldn’t be compatible.

That’s a really misleading headline; a Mastodon instance has done this, Mastodon as a whole can’t do this because it’s free software, it can be used for any purpose.

It’s “Wastebasket” in the UK on the GNOME desktop. I’m happy enough with that.