When I click links in lemmy comments that explicitly include http in the url, the resulting page is always https. To me, the preferred behavior would be to default to https if no protocol is specified, but to respect the user’s preference if given.

Most of the time, there is no downside to changing to https, but some sites will result in an error if they don’t properly support https (I’ve encountered this when incorrectly typing a url before, but as it was not recent I don’t recall the details), and in rare cases the same domain name may serve different content on http vs https, making the ability to specify when linking desirable.

For example, http://xkcdsw.com is an archive of fan-edited comics, while https://xkcdsw.com is some kind of crypto site. While obviously that’s dodgy on the site end, it’s also strange to be completely unable to link the former without telling people to manually remove the s.

Is this redirecting happening on the app level, or the instance level, or something else? It’s not unique to me, as I was first alerted to it by replies that were confused at my links not going where I said they went.