@blogdiva@mastodon.socialfor the love of the internet: DO NOT USE TINY URL OR LINK SHORTENERS UNLESS YOU OWN THE SERVERS AND PLAN TO KEEP THEM RUNNING BEYOND YOUR DEATH
the amount of dead links on my pre-2015 tweets it absolutely painful. there's no way to salvage any of it: Twitter won't include the actual URL in the data dump they give you.
i know people use them for metrics but for what you're paying them, get a blog with ActivityPub (ohai Wordpress) and push your toots from there. voilá! now you have metrics
@blogdiva True. Also Twitter itself creates its own short t.co/ short URLs. So if folks are trying to archive their own tweets, they need to make sure to separately archive all the t.co links Twitter actually used for them in order for the old archive to lead to those sites.
https://help.archive.org/help/how-to-archive-your-tweets-with-the-wayback-machine/
@blogdiva when I took my Twitter data out, I used someone's tool that went through the shortened links and replaced them with the correct ones.
[I thought I lost any reference to it, but turns out it was my very first Mastodon bookmark!]
https://mastodon.social/@timhutton@mathstodon.xyz/109316834810445620
But in general, yeah same feeling (thus why I have a half-assed attempt at a URL shortener for myself waiting to use my shortest domain!)
@blogdiva and for a related pet peeve of mine, did you know O'Reilly's eBooks use a .ly-hosted URL shortener for *all* of their outbound links?
@blogdiva did twitter do purge of their old shortened links or something?
@christmastree yeeeeeup. they changed their shortener system and completely fucked up from 2007 to 2015. they basically have been degrading access to content for all the years of the Arab Spring, Occupy, Ferguson and the beginning years of BLM.
@blogdiva I wrote and host my own URL shortener on my own short domain. I consider it critical to keep it running forever*. Despite making my own, I still think it's a bad idea to use in most cases for exactly the reason you're describing.
*At least as long as possible given the constant entropy of technology on the Internet. Even a lot of the origin urls I've pointed to over the years are gone at this point, but I configured my system to fall back to the Internet Archive when possible.
posting any kind of link to externally hosted content (even a miniature DNS like link shorteners) is risky because you don't control the data you're sharing / pointing to.
If you can, try and remember to download videos you like. Save songs that resonate with you. Take screenshots of important tweets that other people make. Then, you can share them when they're thoroughly divorced from the context in which they were made, and in doing so share information to a group of people who might not otherwise have heard the words you're sharing.
Like posting Mastodon links on Facebook - can you imagine!
@blogdiva Yep, I’ve made this mistake … I would go even further! I had a link shortener that I installed on our own server—but which the creators decided to stop servicing! That was annoying as I thought my own installation would prevent future dead links, but clearly something relied on the developers’ set-up for everything to function properly.
Plus, URL / link shorteners are just bad from a security point of view.
@blogdiva well that’s extremely disappointing but also not at all surprising.
@blogdiva Oh but don't you know! The network NEVER goes down! And these days we do it all in THE CLOWN!!!!
@blogdiva What's the point of url shorteners???
I mean, in addition to the spying option.
@blogdiva Absolutely. When I exported my tweets as a static website, I immediately wrote something to pick out all the short-links and replace them with the originals.
Years ago, I remember seeing a plan to buy out and archive shortener databases as companies went out of business, but I don't know what came of it.