Feature suggestion: Choose frontend automatically for link

[vecna13]

It would be really cool if users could, without entering the frontend name, be automatically redirected to an appropriate frontend service for a given link. For example, if https://farside.link/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whatever redirected to [an Invidious instance]/watch?v=whatever

[benbusby]

Thanks for the suggestion, I really like that idea.

I just pushed a commit that enables this functionality. You can now provide links with or without the protocol (i.e. "youtube.com/watch?v=whatever" and "https://youtube.com/watch?v=whatever" are treated the same). This applies for all supported services with a 1:1 mirroring of URL paths with their parent service.

The feature will be live later today.

[m040601]

... with a 1:1 mirroring of URL paths with their parent service...

This is just such a great improvement. Really makes configuring your Firefox, your text mode browser, your RSS reader, your router, your firewall fillter, your network, whatever, etc. such a piece of cake.

A big thanks to benbusy for this wonderfull, so much underrated, tool. Your brilliant idea, and work commited is much appreciated.

[benbusby]

Thanks, I appreciate the kind words!

[lhindir]

Could you make this work with the _feature as well (e.g. https://farside.link/_/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ)? On an unrelated note, the _ feature doesn’t seem to work reliably for me. It frequently drops the path or query string so I end up at e.g. https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch (without the v parameter) or https://libredd.it (without the search path I input).

[benbusby]

@lhindir thanks for pointing that out, should be fixed now.

[lhindir]

Thanks! Another thing: The Bibliogram dev chose to use a different path layout than Instagram. Mainly, users have a leading /u/ not present in Instagram URL’s, “so all existing top level paths are a feature page, and all URLs starting with /u/ are users.”¹ I don’t know whether you think it’s in scope for Farside to handle these path quirks in downstream services, but right now, using most Instagram links with this feature fails because of this.

Footnotes

1. https://git.sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram-docs/tree/master/item/docs/Reserved%20URLs.md ↩

[benbusby]

Yeah I've encountered that as well. I'd rather not get in the habit of handling path inconsistencies like that in Farside, but since there isn't a suitable alternative to Bibliogram that does match Instagram's path paradigm, it might be necessary. I'll consider adding that.

[benbusby]

@lhindir I just pushed an update to prepend the /u/ prefix if determined to be a link for a specific user's profile page.