Please take this with a grain of salt and note that I’m not trying to reinvent anything here, nor am I saying that this is better than the alternatives which might already be available out there. I’m simply trying to solve my own need and maybe provide something useful to the FOSS community at the same time.

On iOS, there’s this feature which I think is called “link preview”, which is pretty self-explanatory, as it allows you to open a popup inside the current app to preview a link, by long pressing it.