I just posted this in a comment here: https://lemmy.ml/post/112460/comment/110439 (link goes to the “What are your most wanted Lemmy features?” post in the “lemmy” community)

I am following up now with this new post, because I just found https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/875 (link goes to the “Community name in post URL” issue on the lemmy project’s github, under the LemmyNet organization… note github has 2 of those 3 pieces of information in their URL) where I learned that @dessalines@lemmy.ml has actually thought about this and arrived at (imo) the wrong conclusion. Afaict, they have decided that having human-meaningful in URLs is “silly” and therefore we shouldn’t?!

I am hoping they’ll change their mind!

I think having no idea what a URL is about makes for a really lousy user experience. When people send me lemmy links, I want to have a clue as to what they’re about before I decide to click it. Maybe I’ve seen it before. Maybe it’s a meme, and I want to look at it later. Or maybe it’s the answer to a question I urgently need to know the answer to. So, I have to click to find out - often to discover it is just a meme i’ve seen 3 times already.

Having the community name and the post title in the URL would make my lemmy experience much better.

In my opinion, there is no benefit to lemmy URLs being short except for in the rare case that you need to transmit one verbally or on paper. But, in that case, you can actually just omit the post title when copying the URL, as there would still be a database ID preceding it! (Try it with a reddit URL: if you remove the title slug and just supply the database ID, it redirects you to the post’s canonical URL with the slug in it.)

Lemmy devs: please reconsider this!

  • @Echedenyan@lemmy.ml
    0•2 years ago

    my proposal still allows for that because the title part can always still be omitted when entering the URL

    These links are completely ugly. Short links are perfectly clean and should be by default.

    As a WebDev student we are taught to take into account that.

    Recently, we started to modify an app (in order to learn BladeOne template engine) and got the way to show urls in a WebApp by “folder” addresses.

    Basically, the WebApp overwrites the default web address and replace its structure following a hierarchy in the sense of example.com/, example.com/user/ (a list of users), example.com/user/1 (specific user), example.com/user/create (create a new user), etc.

    And this is a recommended way here.

        • @remram@lemmy.ml
          1•2 years ago

          Link to where “WebDev working standards” say URLs should be short? SEO benefits from more info in URL, and so does web browser history/bookmark search. Many platforms such as Reddit and Medium put the title (or part of it) in the URL.

          Presenting your opinions as fact and quoting “standards and teaching” when asked does not advance the debate.

        • @testingthis@lemmy.ml
          1•2 years ago

          No, that is not a WebDev working standard. String-based IDs are legitimate as well, and can even be primary keys in a database.