Friendly post urls

submitted by
PieFed dev

Rather than a format like piefed.social/post/long_number, posts how have a url that includes the community name and title in it.

Like this: https://piefed.social/c/animatedmusicvideos@sh.itjust.works/p/1382987/junior-senior-move-your-feet-official-music-video-hd

This improves readability, helps people differentiate between multiple links in a list and is better for SEO.

The old style of url still works too and there may be occasions when you get taken to a url like https://piefed.social/post/1382987 but we’ll be working to remove those over time.

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@rimu It can be any community name and title though

E.g., piefed.social/c/anything/p/138 resolves to the same content as your original link.

That feels like a risk - you could give someone a URL that looks like it's for one community/title, but goes to a completely different one.

Trivial example - piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@pi - looks trustworthy, but is completely different. That could be NSFW content, and you won't know until you click.

It isn't NSFW, you can trust me.

Or can you...?

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PieFed dev OP

Yes, the /p/number bit is the only functional part of the url. I’ll make it check for tampering!

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rimu@piefed.social for what it’s worth, we had this discussion a decade ago too.

We ended up being very simplistic and not tying anything to anything else.

So posts are not tied to topics (theoretically you could have a post in multiple topics… we don’t do that, but you can)

And topics aren’t tied to categories (same deal, and we also don’t have topics in multiple categories… yet!!, cross-posting will change that.

So when you have a direct url to a post it’s just /post/. A friendly URL uses a post index, but we can do that because we order posts linearly. Piefed doesn’t have that advantage unfortunately.

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@rimu this is awesome!

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Thanks so much, this is also one of the things that annoys me on Lemmy

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Awesome! The post ID is still instance-specific and not community-specific, right? Asking because community-specific would make it very easy to view it from a different instance, but I can imagine that’s complicated.

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PieFed dev OP

Yeah, still instance-specific.

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Nice, appreciate it!

BTW hashtags look messy and spammy as if shouting for attention. Tags organize content quietly and work better for reach and discovery.

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