It’s not a particular protocol right now, but it would be a URI that refers to a specific resource. A protocol could also be defined – e.g. a restricted subset of HTTPS that returns JSON objects following a defined schema or something like that – but the point really is that I want to be able to refer to a thread not a webpage. I don’t think that’s a silly thing to want to be able to do.

Right now, I can only effectively link to a post or thread as rendered by a specific interface – e.g. for me, this thread is https://old.reddthat.com/post/30710789 using reddthat’s mlmym interface. That’s probably not how most users would like to view the thread if I want to link it to them. Any software that recognizes the new URI scheme could understand that I mean a particular thread rather than how it’s rendered by a particular web app, and go fetch it and render it appropriately in their client if I link it. (If current clients try to be clever about HTTP links, it becomes ambiguous if I mean the thread as rendered into a webpage in specific way or if I actually meant the thread itself but had to refer to it indirectly; that causes problems too.)

I don’t think lemmy:// is necessarily the best prefix – especially if mbin, piefed, etc. get on board – just that I would like functionality like that very much, and that something like a lemmy URI scheme (or whatever we can get people to agree on) might be a good way to accomplish it.