This is very helpful, thank you! I’ll look into setting up more of that sometime

Good to know, I’ll explore some more

Thank you!

Makes sense, thank you!

Sounds good! This was my first dive into browser extensions as well. It’s not too bad once you go over the basics. If you give it a try, see the contributing page on the repo’s wiki for some resources on how to get started with browser extensions.

A super short summary is:

• manifest.json is the entry point, it links to HTML files (which represent things like the popup, sidebar) and scripts (which do most of the work)
• the background script runs all the time (see background.js), and the content scripts run on specific pages (ex. There’s one for Lemmy community pages, one for error pages)

If you DO give it a try, we were part way through migrating features from the LemmyTools userscript and that might be a good place to start. I wasn’t familiar with userscripts so I didn’t make much progress, and can’t get back to it for a little while. The issues page of the repo should have LemmyTools related features tagged. If any details are missing, let me know and I’ll add them in :)

We actually have an extension for this, it’s one of the more popular extensions for Lemmy&Kbin, going by the counts on chrome/firefox stores:

!instance_assistant@lemmy.ca

It was originally made to solve this problem, but we’ve been adding other features as well. Right now you can redirect communities and posts, and redirect links by right clicking on them.

Let me know if it works, and also where it doesn’t so that we can improve it :)

We’re actually working on a browser extension for this! It currently supports both communities and posts

!Instance_Assistant@lemmy.ca

We ran into the same issue, federated sites are hard to work with. Right now, the extension has it so that a user needs to right click on a link to be redirected. That way the user can choose which links get redirected, and there’s no chance of accidentally redirecting the wrong thing.

There are other solutions (using the API for example), but they seemed to slow the browser down too much. Another proposed feature that hasn’t been implemented yet was to redirect when holding down a key (when holding down “r”, try to redirect the link).

Feel free to take a look, try it, and you can totally contribute code. It’s all open source and we’ve tried to keep the code simple and easy to verify/contribute.

I don’t have as much experience working with the stack, but from what I’ve read it seems like Rust is a pretty solid choice for the backend. It also seems like a lot of the upgrades people want are for the front end, so that’s what would benefit the most from being simpler.

Typescript makes sense, and a handful of frameworks have typescript support. Would anyone know more about the benefits of using Inferno over something like Vue/Nuxt or plain React?

That sounds good, and it sounds easy enough to implement.

I’ve made the issue here: https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant/issues/45

I’ll get to it when I have time in the next few months, unless someone else gets to it first :)

Hope it works for you!

Hope it helps!

There are a few userscripts out there which I could integrate into the extension. It depends on when this commit gets pushed into Lemmy core:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2397

After that, it could still be useful if someone wanted to block it browser wide. At that point I’d check if people still want something like that.

Sorry to those that have already seen this. I’m trying to space out the posts so it’s not in a large clump in your feeds. People have different subscription lists, so I’m trying to reach those that haven’t seen it yet.

These are the last 4 posts :)

Yes fair enough, I’ll include a better description as a dropdown in future posts.

Instance Assistant is a browser extension with a handful of tools on Desktop. It started out as a button to redirect to your home instance, but with the help of others we’ve included a few other functions and are working on more.

You can see more here: https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant#features

Screenshots here: https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant#screenshots

This is something that is probably better if implemented in Lemmy itself. It would be tied to a particular community, and it wouldn’t need to cross over between instances.

If someone tried to make a browser extension for it, it would only appear for people using the same browser extension. Some third party apps have it like that, and it’s not that helpful.

What’s better for a browser extension / app to take on is cross-instance functionality, such as jumping between instances, having buttons / content in the UI, etc. I’m working on an extension for that ( !instance_assistant@lemmy.ca ), and while I really want flairs as well, I don’t think it would be good for a browser extension.

Once it’s implemented in Lemmy itself, then we could probably make it easier to add/remove/view/filter flairs using a browser extension.

I’ve been using Nova Launcher for years now, but I explored other options a few months ago because of the ownership change. Lawnchair was the best one I found, but I didn’t switch to it because it looked like it was missing features I needed. Folders was an important one.

Which version / source are you using for the app? I got a bit lost trying to find a recent version. The last release on the GitHub is from 2018, and the last prerelease is from a year ago. There’s also an issue for the folders which I was following, and it actually just went stale: https://github.com/LawnchairLauncher/lawnchair/issues/2471

I also see Lawnchair2, but that looked like a fork or something

This is something we have a workaround on an extension I’m working on. You can right-click on a link and have it open in your home instance

https://lemmy.ca/c/instance_assistant