Feature: Alternate Source Selector

Implementation Difficulty: Easy

Live Example: https://tesseract.dubvee.org/c/[email protected] (The “link” icon to the left of the post’s URL.)

Rationale: I’m quite annoyed with people whining “pAyWallED!” in news post comments, and this is Tesseract’s way of addressing that (for users of that UI, anyway)

Description:

On posts with links (that aren’t images, audio, video, Youtube, or other media), a dropdown menu is added with links to alternate sources.

Each one will search for the URL in the selected archive provider (currently Ghost Archive, Archive Today, 12ft.io) or Ground News (new in 1.4.5).

Lemmy-UI kind of does this, but completely ass-backwards (only during post creation to set the post link; I’ll spare you my spiel about how that’s a horrible vector for misinformation).

On Youtube-like posts (YT, Invidious, or Piped), the options are changed to go to the canonical YT link, your preferred Invidious instance, or your preferred Piped instance, but that’s just a secondary (but still nice) feature of that component.

Would love to see something like this more widely adopted and am more than happy to answer any implementation questions.

  • DerisionConsultingEnglish
    1·
    5 months ago

    I agree that you shouldn’t pay for any app that doesn’t format text correctly, no matter how it fails, but I think the worst offender is spoilers.

    Something being left-aligned in a table instead of centre-aligned probably isn’t going to destroy the intent, message, or general flow of a post.
    A bot that makes posts 4 lines before you expand it but is instead always 24+ lines long, is a little jarring and disruptive. A post with a riddle, joke, or piece of trivia whose answer is displayed ruins the point.
    Granted, the apps that turn subscript into strike-through are also shitty, but I don’t see subscript being used nearly as often.