Htaccess redirect to public folder

Hi there, i have a public folder where everybody can publicly download files the folder is shareable and can be accessed by:

/index.php/s/QkkFpBwc4JrsCDc

but i would want to make it available with simply

/public

but

Redirect 301 /public /index.php/s/QkkFpBwc4JrsCDc in the .htaccess always redirects to the login page? Actually i thought there is an inbuild option to define a alias for a folder/file?

any idea how to do it?