Oh, i understood your way of doing it as a service that checks a list (remote or local) if this is an instance, where the list needs to be updated regulary, thats why i wanted a flag that tells the service “Hey, i am a Lemmy instance!” when it checks every link before opening.
But yes, your implementation would be a future proof idea that would work like a charm!
I realized this yesterday when dealing with a problem in Linux. My first attempt was to search for a solution by adding site:reddit.com to my search query… Pure muscle memory!