Hey everyone, version 2.35.0 is here and it has a pretty cool update :)
Lately I’ve been sharing Lemmy memes with one of my friends who has Voyager. Usually we just text meme images which works and is nice and quick. But sometimes I want to link to a specific Lemmy post! Previously, I sent the direct Lemmy link, e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/29827953. However, this opens in a web browser when my friend taps the link in the text message. They could click “open in voyager” from the share menu or paste in Voyager’s search, but that’s a lot of work for viewing a dumb meme.
So introducing https://go.getvoyager.app/! By changing the setting “General” -> “Share Instance” to “Voyager” (will be changed to default option in a month or so), tapping “Share” on a post, comment, community etc will share a link via https://go.getvoyager.app/. Like this: https://go.getvoyager.app/lemmy.world/post/29827953.
When my friend taps the link from their text message, it will automatically open in Voyager! And if my friend doesn’t have Voyager installed, it will open a preview of the link, along with options to install Voyager. Pretty slick! That’s the magic of universal links.
Let me know what you think! There’s more FAQ here too. In other news I’m going to be on vacation for the next few weeks if you’re wondering why development will slow/pause.
Enjoy your vacation!
Thanks for all your work. Have a nice vacation!
This is sick! I figured people might want this so I have a few tricks to achieve essentially the same result but without any intermediate linking step. For example, view this post in Blorp. I’m curious why you decided to go with this method and if you think there are any advantages over my solution. Likely my solution breaks if you are on an instance that doesn’t federate with the instance hosting the original post.
The main reason is SSR so sharing in messages provider the preview image and whatnot. Also more control over the onboarding, and avoiding confusing the PWA with the native app. That’s a nice alternative though!
My SSR is nonexistent, so that’s a great point. Would be cool to see universal links on Voyager instead of just deep links, assuming you want to show install/open app when browsing Voyager in Safari. If you’re still interested in Tauri, unfortunately I haven’t figured out how to do universal linking yet (deep linking works). But Capacitor plays nice with universal links.
Is it not possible to just add Lemmy domains to open in the Voyager app?
This service requires knowing that the other party also has and exclusively uses Voyager.
There’s also a “Mastodon redirect” app that can redirect these requests to a designated app so you could potentially collaborate with them about doing the same. I don’t think this is a terribly seamless approach.
E: also please add FDroid to your installation options.
E2: just looked it up and see you already have most of the lemmy domains in there to open automatically. So this seems unecessary? Unless I am misunderstanding its’ purpose?
Universal Links that are verified, like go.getvoyager.app, will automatically open in the app. The Lemmy links are there, but are “unverified” and won’t open in the app unless the user configures them to. Also, adding unverified domains isn’t possible in iOS. So this is a much more universal, zero-config option.
Mastodon redirect is great and works with voyager, but is more of a power user thing. Go.getvoyager.app works out of the box :)
This service requires knowing that the other party also has and exclusively uses Voyager.
Well, kinda. It is one click to open the Lemmy link directly. I’ve also thought about adding config options to the service to auto redirect to the Lemmy instance, to make it unobtrusive for other app users. The code is open source so I’m happy to hear suggestions to make it work better!
adding unverified domains isn’t possible in iOS
Ah yes, more problems for iOS users 😅
