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!

  • Arthur BesseOP
    5•2 years ago

    On github I see @nutomic@lemmy.ml said “If we make this change, we should do it before releasing federation. After that it will get much harder to change the URLs.” - I haven’t looked closely at the data model but I’m optimistic that a graceful upgrade to a better URL format should not be a problem. Eg, this post is currently https://lemmy.ml/post/152773 and in my ideal world in the future that URL would become a redirect to a canonical URL such as https://lemmy.ml/post/152773/lemmy/Lemmy_URLs_should_be_human_meaningful or https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy/152773/Lemmy_URLs_should_be_human_meaningful

    • @nutomic@lemmy.mlM
      3•2 years ago

      Yes that migrating the urls would be possible. Just needs someone to implement it, as always ;)

      • Arthur BesseOP
        0•2 years ago

        cool, i’m glad to hear you’re amenable to this change!

        maybe a good reason for me to finally start learning rust :)

        (i’m not going to in the immediate future, however, so if someone else wants to do it please do!)

        • @nutomic@lemmy.mlM
          1•2 years ago

          It would be a pretty complex change, probably better to start with something smaller first. Anyway its always good to have more contributors :)

    • ghost_laptop
      0•2 years ago

      I think it’s better to keeep the /c/communityaddress part so that only with reading the URL you can know where the discussion is taking place, also posts could be displayed with /p/ following how everything else is being displayed /c/, /u/. but I agree with you. It would be much better.

      • Arthur BesseOP
        1•2 years ago

        That is a nice URL, but it omits any database ID, which means that you couldn’t have two posts with the same title. Also, you would need a more expensive database lookup to serve the URL. For wikis and blogs, I think using the post title as the unique key makes sense, but I don’t think that actually makes sense for lemmy.

          • @edward@lemmy.ml
            -2•2 years ago

            https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy/post/XYZ123 as the canonical url would be best IMO. Then the title following can be optional. But post instead of p seems like a good idea, not too much longer, but helps readability. c instead of community is fine because 1) community is kinda long and 2) the single letter prefix for communities is pretty well established by reddit and among all of its clones.

            • ghost_laptop
              -1•2 years ago

              Well, that is the exact opposite of what OP thinks, since it’s not human meaningful if title is optional. Also I don’t see the reason why /post/ helps with readability more than /p/.

                • ghost_laptop
                  1•2 years ago

                  Ahh, I get your point, I think it could redirect by default to the human readable one but if one where to delete to only the ID should also work. Yeah, I understand the only title based URL part.

                  I disagree on being nicer, since it makes the URL larger and it does not follow the same pattern as everything else, but let’s agree on disagree on that part.

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

        It is simple and short.

        The only part I don’t like are the URLs with “data_type” and such things included that appears in some parts of Lemmy. (I don’t remember where).

        • Arthur BesseOP
          1•2 years ago

          You memorize lemmy post IDs?! They’re currently six digits here, and I can’t imagine why you would need to memorize one. It is sort of nice that they can be communicated verbally, though I doubt that actually happens very often. But, in any case, my proposal still allows for that because the title part can always still be omitted when entering the URL. Do you ever receive lemmy URLs in chat? I do, as I imagine many people do, and that is the case I would like to see improved.

          I think the only URLs containing data_type that I’ve seen were 404 URLs from a bug in the inbox, sometimes triggered by reloading immediately after clicking “mark all as read”.

          • @Echedenyan@lemmy.ml
            -1•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.

  • @kevincox@lemmy.ml
    4•2 years ago

    A common pattern here is making part of the URL human-readable but non-normative. 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.

    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…

    • Arthur BesseOP
      1•2 years ago

      I’d rather have the URLs be self-describing.

      Automatically formatting issue numbers on sites like github is nice, but I think doing it with freeform titles mid sentence like that would be jarring more often than not.

    • Dessalines
      3•2 years ago

      Either this, or using an optional &title= param is the only way I’d support this, and in that case you might as well include the whole post title, maybe changing spaces to underscores.