I had noticed that some cross-posted posts showed a different style of link for those cross-posts: some show it as a link under the title and header of the post but above the body, and some show the link (usually) in the body of the post. In addition, the cross-post links above the body are relative links (open in my home instance), but the ones inside the body are hard links (open in the source community’s home instance). Lastly, the links inside the body show only on one of the cross-posts, but the ones outside the body show on both cross-posts.
At first I thought that the second style, the one in the body that’s hard-linked and only on one of the posts, was due to the poster manually adding that link. However, over time I realized that that was not the case because it looked too consistent across different users.
I searched for a mention of this in this community and found this post about it: https://lemmy.zip/post/8016049 - unfortunately, there’s either something I’m still missing or that the explanation is missing.
Here’s an example post I happened to find that is linking to an external article’s URL, but has both styles of cross-post link. It’s a post linking to an article URL too: https://sh.itjust.works/post/64304718

Does anyone know how or why the two different styles of cross-post link get created?

the sh.itjust.works link is just the body text of the post, it’s not really part of Lemmy’s UI
Lemmy does fill it in automatically when you start a crosspost and there is body text, but it’s just plain text
it’s useful if your instance isn’t able to find the crosspost automatically, but the automatic links are easier when they do exist like in your screenshot
I’m not gonna disagree on this lol
Thanks. I think what you mentioned about Lemmy being able to find the cross-post automatically may be close to the explanation for why this happens.
I would just like to know what to expect and why. I cross-posted something a couple of days ago and it did not show or give me the option to show the hard-link in the body: https://lemmy.ca/post/68531648
That’s because the original post did not have body text only a link