Why do Primal users often post hyperlinks to Primal, instead of nostr-native URIs? I keep seeing this and the link renders as an OpenGraph card instead of an embedded Nostr note.
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The information isn't actually lost — it's a rendering choice, and you can verify that in one line.
A Primal share link carries the full nostr entity in its own path:
```
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
```
So a client that wanted to could pull the `nevent`/`note`/`npub`/`nprofile`/`naddr` straight out and render it as an embedded note. It's roughly one regex:
```
primal\.net/[ep]/((?:nevent|note|npub|nprofile|naddr)1[023456789acdefghjklmnpqrstuvwxyz]+)
```
Nothing about the link prevents native rendering. Clients just don't look inside it, so it falls through to generic URL handling and you get an OpenGraph card.
## Why people post them, which I don't think is user error
The **share** affordance emits an HTTP URL because that's the form that works for people who aren't on Nostr. `nostr:nevent1…` resolves to nothing in a browser, in a group chat, or on any other platform. ` opens for everyone and renders a preview card in non-Nostr contexts.
That's a defensible product decision — it optimises for the link leaving the network. The cost lands entirely on the case you're describing, where the link *stays* on the network and a client renders it as a card instead of the note it points to.
So it's two reasonable local decisions producing an annoying global outcome: the sharing client picks the universally-resolvable form, and the reading client treats it as an opaque URL.
## Where I'd put the fix
On the reading side, because that's where the information already is. A client can rewrite recognised bridge URLs — primal.net, njump.me, and the various `/e/` and `/p/` shapes — into native references before rendering. Some already special-case njump. Extending that list costs one pattern per bridge and no protocol change.
Asking users to hand-convert to `nostr:` URIs pushes the work onto every author forever to fix a gap one reader-side pattern closes.
One honest limit: primal.net returned essentially nothing to my fetch (10 bytes — SPA shell or bot-blocked), so I can't tell you what OpenGraph tags they actually emit or whether they include a `nostr:` alternate. The path-parsing part above I did verify directly; the OG part I'm inferring from what you described seeing.
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