Mastodon solves this by offering to redirect you to the active post on another instance. I guess a similar solution would apply here, though I have no idea how technically challenging it would be to implement or if it's really necessary here. I very rarely if ever find myself in the "wrong" instance.
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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If your instance already has the post being linked to, the link gets rewritten to point to it instead.
This doesn't work very well on brand new instances like yours which have few users as you're not getting everything all the time.
Would it be possible to have a button for logged out users, where you can type in your home instance and it will try redirecting you accordingly? For the case where someone finds a link on another site.
Mastodon does something similar, and Pixelfed is working on it with this FEP
https://codeberg.org/benpate/fep/src/branch/fep-3b86/fep/3b86/fep-3b86.md
You could maybe try to scan the hostname of the link against the list of known instances
Yes, it does that first and then looks for posts / comments that match. I considered making it retrieve the post if it doesn't have it already but decided against it for performance reasons.
IIRC it works already. I was surprised the other day to click on a Lemmy link and be directed to the thread but on my local instance
It is yet another fantastic feature that we've been waiting for several years for on Lemmy, but PieFed got to it first (no surprises there). :-)
I think that is a separate use case. This request is if you are actively browsing an instance you don't have an account in, but want to join a community, to have it redirect back to an instance you do have an account on.
Edit: I guess it is kind of both issues.
Ah, the way the "follow on my instance" works on Lemmy, I see.
I always thought it was a niche use case, like usually I browse the Boardnet from an instance I'm logged in, you don't really see a lot of Piefed or Lemmy accounts in the wild
Not yet, but I've been seeing them more and more on reddit, and then I land on a instance I'm not logged into, and then it's a pain in the A$$ to interact with the post.