I would love to be more active in posting links to articles and websites I find interesting to the fediverse, but I find that searching for the appropriate community can be a hassle. With so many different instances hosting the same communities, it can be difficult to know where to post. Is there a Firefox extension that would allow me to quickly and easily post links to a single Lemmy community (for example https://reddthat.com/c/random)? I’m envisioning something like a bookmarking tool that lets me post the website I’m viewing with a single click. If there isn’t an existing extension that does this, I’d be interested in finding a similar program that I could use for inspiration to create one myself.
I think the “prove you are not a bot” and the preview picture (if any) are often automatically-added. It gets complicated, bc the picture (for example) MAY be added by the posting software and/or the server, and the picture may or may not propagate. Whether or not this happens depends on the version (of posting software and server), how it was configured, and where it is hosted. Sometimes, the preview will not be generated because the content being previewed will disallow this – for example, youtube previews on !fullmoviesonyoutube@lemm.ee used to be automatically generated, but I think youtube changed something so that doesn’t happen any more. Furthermore, the reading client will sometimes generate preview pictures anyway. CAVEAT: I only partially understand all this.
Summary: preview generation on the fediverse is a complex issue.
and when any of what you said happens, you go and manually edit it. that is the effort i am talking about.