URL shortener links stored in your ATProto PDS

jszymborski

Super cool idea, not sure how I feel about this. The risk with URL shorteners is commonly that people get tired running them and they disappear, making the web even more brittle than before (I wrote about goo.gl doing this recently [0]). Centralization can be great here because before giving up the ghost, ethical operators of shorteners can donate their database mapping short links to full links to archivists. That's what efforts like 301works.org [1]. Are all about. I can, however, see how decentralization can be helpful because it limits the blast radius of a service shutting down. ATProto is also cool because you can migrate your data to another PDS without explicit coordination of your current one since its baked into the protocol. Despite that, I can imagine this potentially being the worst of both worlds. You have a centralized domain and resolving service but the data is distributed, so the operators could still unilaterally take down the resolver and the URL. Also, if individuals aren't paying attention, they might not migrate their data off the PDS. My ignorance of ATProto is showing here... can a PDS unilaterally move the data it hosts to another PDS (say, one ran by the archive team?) If so this can be very cool. If not, it sounds more fragile than a traditional url shortener that is prepared to donate its URL mappings. [0] https://jszym.com/blog/archiving_googl/ [1] https://archive.org/details/301works