“The story, which did not go out on the wire to our customers, didn’t go through our standard editing process. We are looking into how that happened,” AP spokesperson Nicole Meir told The Verge in an email.
News reports (and fact-checks specifically) are often worded in a way that carefully threads a needle — there’s a difference between saying something definitively didn’t happen versus saying there’s no evidence of it. My guess is that the AP headline was the problem here because it claims to debunk something that is unknowable.
Why is it programmed that way?
I assume it’s because different instances are on different domains, so a naive link won’t take you to your instance if it’s some other one. Like on on ttrpg.network and you’re on lemmy.world. for me the link points to https://ttrpg.network/c/notnews@lemmy.world
You could try to parse the link and figure out if it’s a Lemmy destination and replace it with your instance, but how would you know? That sounds error prone.
You could have a special syntax for linking to other instances, but that’s what the exclamation point thing is.
You could maybe have each lemmy server check if you’re signed in somewhere else and redirect you, but that also seems error prone. What if you’re signed into two different ones?
I don’t work on Lemmy so this is guesswork.