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!

  • @kevincox@lemmy.ml
    2•2 years ago

    A common pattern here is making part of the URL human-readable but ignored. For example instead of https://lemmy.ml/post/112460/comment/110439 you have https://lemmy.ml/post/Lemmy-112460/comment/Lemmy-URLs-should-be-human-meaningful-110439. Everything except the numeric IDs is just stripped before hitting the API but makes it easier for a human to get an idea of what to expect.

    There are a couple of minor downsides here:

    1. This can be used for phishing because the server ignores the text here. A malicious user can put something malicious.
    2. Can affect caching. I don’t think this is a major issue and can be resolve by redirecting all to the canonical URL. The redirect is cheep and the canonical URL can be cached.

    This pattern is used on a number of sites such as Stack Overflow and Reddit and seems to work well.

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

      One way to get around #1… if there is text, it has to be specific text, either via a redirect or 404…

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

        That is what I meant by redirect to the canonical URL. The 404 approach may be nice to avoid problem 1. However, it has interesting implications because now you need to store the original slug (in case of edits, algorithm changes…), so instead of being a UI-only feature it needs some server support. Or maybe it could be something like returning a 404 with “Warning, the title of this post doesn’t match the URL. Do you want to visit {current title}?” and link to the post with the updated title. I’m not sure it is the best UX but it is an interesting idea.