Its like if facebook made you login again because you follwed a facebook.com link from within facebook, all because the user who created the link is in a different time-zone. What's not to understand about how broken that would be?

Not what I'm proposing

An user following an absolute link that doesn't re-direct them back to their own instance is likely not going to be able to interact with the content there.

Again. Not what I'm proposing.

Within the context of a Lemmy user following a link from a comment, at least, the relative link is more useful.

Only when viewed on one specific client, on one specific fediverse platform.

Fact is, Lemmy is already capable of serving up a different parsed url for logged-in users and non-users, the webUI just hasn't implemented the feature yet, and so here we are.

This is what I'm proposing. Except being logged in isn't even a requirement for the webUI to open all links it can open locally, locally.

And looking into it, I'd much rather have a system for "mentioning" posts or comments in the same "object@instance" format that we already use to link communities and users, as proposed here. Such a system would have no need for client specific relative url paths, and would boil down the mention to the object ID and the instance where it can be found, allowing any client or even other fediverse platform to easily parse it into something that can be used.