Implement some sort of programmatic way to recognize that a site uses Lemmy

[Starmann]

Requirements

• [X] Is this a feature request? For questions or discussions use https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy_support
• [X] Did you check to see if this issue already exists?
• [X] Is this only a feature request? Do not put multiple feature requests in one issue.
• [ ] Is this a UI / front end issue? Use the lemmy-ui repo.

Is your proposal related to a problem?

Currently every client/frontend I've seen has issues opening links to other instances. I think it would be useful if clients could detect if a link was to another instance and render it in-client instead of as a webpage.

Describe the solution you'd like.

Best idea I can think of is a url like /lemmy which could return info about the current instance. If it returns valid JSON, clients can can then attempt to treat it as a Lemmy instance.

Describe alternatives you've considered.

I suppose you could also create a centralized list or something, but that kinda defeats the point of the platform.

Additional context

If this does get implemented, I've been thinking of writing a small self-hosted app that would basically just ask you for your favorite instance and save that info locally, then subsequently redirect you to that instance automatically.

[rimu]

The HTML5 spec includes a meta tag for this purpose and it is widely used.

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#standard-metadata-names

e.g. <meta name="generator" content="Lemmy" /> or <meta name="generator" content="Drupal 7" />

[Starmann]

The HTML5 spec includes a meta tag for this purpose and it is widely used.

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#standard-metadata-names

e.g. <meta name="generator" content="Lemmy" /> or <meta name="generator" content="Drupal 7" />

That's true. I wonder if we could introduce some custom metadata that tells you the version and other metadata like whether the community shows upvotes, whether the community allows you to create a subreddit, how many instances are Federated, etc.

[huanga]

% curl -H "Accept: application/activity+json" https://lemmy.ml/.well-known/nodeinfo
{"links":[{"rel":"http://nodeinfo.diaspora.software/ns/schema/2.0","href":"https://lemmy.ml/nodeinfo/2.0.json"}]}
% curl -H "Accept: application/activity+json" https://lemmy.ml/nodeinfo/2.0.json
{"version":"2.0","software":{"name":"lemmy","version":"0.17.4"},"protocols":["activitypub"],"usage":{"users":{"total":36827,"activeHalfyear":4166,"activeMonth":3695},"localPosts":82253,"localComments":177090},"openRegistrations":false}

No need to reinvent the wheel and injecting additional data into the HTML page when the server already discloses information about the instance.

[Nutomic]

Exactly, use nodeinfo. Including data in html would have to be done in lemmy-ui.