Indicate fediverse URLS

[calculuschild]

Is your proposal related to a problem?

Happily reading a post on Lemmy, I see suspicious links to sh.itjust.works and remmy.dragonpsi.xyz. I do not want to click these links, because:

1) They appear highly suspicious 2) I want to stay on Lemmy. I have no idea where these go.

I suspect a large number of new users are also very hesitant/confused by all these seemingly random URLs until they grasp the Fediverse concept, and even then, it's not obvious which links are inside the Fediverse and not.

Describe the solution you'd like.

Can I suggest some way of marking links appearing in posts and comments that connect to a remote Lemmy instance, such that the link is clearly "safe" place to visit and "part of the Lemmy federation"?

Describe alternatives you've considered.

• Just clicking the risky link. Probably not good practice for internet hygiene.
• Opening https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances and looking up the url for every link. Very slow.

Additional context

Grasping the Fediverse is hard enough. Allowing any custom URL can make an instance appear untrustworthy and suspicious, which doesn't help. Is beehaw a Lemmy instance? A porn page? A phishing site? Who knows! Certainly not a brand-new user.

[dukethorion]

Color Lemmy instance links green, other offsite links blue.

System would have to query the remote server and look for a Lemmy instance, maybe through a port ping? Could also draw from a database of known instances?

[dwelting]

Links to other instances should be relative to the current (home) instance. Otherwise you'll be effectively signed out every time you follow a link to an other post.

Colorcoding links to differentiate between functions should be avoided in my opinion, to help with accessibility.

[calculuschild]

Links to other instances should be relative to the current (home) instance. Otherwise you'll be effectively signed out every time you follow a link to an other post.

I agree.

Colorcoding links to differentiate between functions should be avoided in my opinion, to help with accessibility.

I'm not sure how clearly marking in-fediverse links makes accessibility worse? Can you give an example?

[skspade]

People who suffer from color blindness will have trouble distinguishing and people who are vision impaired using screen readers would not be able to tell. However usage of icons (for color blindness) and an html attribute on the HTML element for screen readers to pick could make it work!

[rszyma]

This issue could be solved by #1048

[glibg10b]

Is there something about federated instances that makes them more trustworthy? What's stopping me from starting my own porn site and federating it?

[calculuschild]

Trustworthy in that you know it's a Lemmy instance vs something else.

If the remote site is a Lemmy instance, presumably you could avoid most porn or other unwanted content by reading the community name. But if it's not a Lemmy instance, it could be anything, including some phishing site or malicious entity trying to run questionable code, etc.

It would be nice to know "at least this link is still a Lemmy instance" so you know what you are getting yourself into.