I think link posts particularly have huge potential here. I do think there are two major ways they could be changed to behave in a more helpful way, however:

  1. Cause the "external link" URL to point to the post, not the link included in the post. This is great for spreading information, but it completely bypasses the Lotide site, probably making it harder to grow as a platform.

  2. Allow a redirect "flag", a simple query string such as "?r=1", to cause the instance to forward the user to the link included in the site. This way, I think Lotide could be effectively used as a self-hosted, easy-to-manage URL shortener.