With all due respect, it seems like a janky solution to have a bot post public comments on request with transformed links specific to a given user’s own instance (that no other users would be likely to care about), just so that they can refresh the page and click on them… If something like this went into widespread use, threads would just become cluttered with comments containing transformed links, and I could see that being really annoying to other users who are trying to properly participate in discussion.
Back on Reddit, I always thought the !remindme bot was pretty dumb. Certain threads would just be spammed with comments for the bot to pick up to remind that specific user on some date to come back and check the thread. We can do better than that here. It was a janky solution to something that was a problem best left to the end-user to manage separately (Just set a reminder in your own calendar…).
This is best left to client-side code in the form of a browser addon, or ideally, the Lemmy frontend itself.
It should be trivial to make an enhancement to the official Lemmy frontend such that links to any other Lemmy communities/posts/comments/etc are transformed to the context of the user’s home instance. It could be a togglable setting in the user’s own settings, or maybe both the original link and the transformed link could be presented to the user on click (to accommodate both desktop and mobile browsing).
I’m actually really surprised this isn’t already implemented given how simple it is to do.