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Is it a problem? Right now it doesn't seem to be a practical problem.

I agree that where we're headed, it seems like services like this will only continually degrade, that a huge amount of the corporate-run internet is undergoing radical #enshittification at an alarming rate, & the nation-states have strapped afterburners onto this hellbound-sled by starting to make the terms of use for these already imperfect the feudal- oops i mean corporate- data-keeps.

New age-verification identity-verification to post stuff has scaled up with shock & awe speeds, with Imgur just burning down huge swarths of the internet. So I guess yeah it has become a practical problem alraedy.

Oh and there's other signs of horror/intensification all about. Specs like Mobile Document Request opening up the Jevon's paradox of making it easier to request government id online are going to make a very shitty 203X's that greatly piss over the internet legacy we have. https://github.com/WICG/mobile-document-request-api/issues/6

But also... we have the saints of human history, https://archive.org, ticking along doing the good deeds. The more rag-tag ArchiveTeam folks. They keep saying it's not for archiving, but I really hope WebPackage / WebBundle specs take off, that we build a norm of take-away sites that we can retain. (Caveat: right now Chrome has zero interest in letting you use old snapshots, but I have zero faith this limited security totalitarianism will hold, given that Certificate Transparency lets us know that indeed this content did come from X site at Y time & had the right cert then.)

In general, it's all the web, so it only sort of matters that the thing goes away. We need to update the maxim, "Cool URIs Dont Change" (https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI). Sometimes the resources go away. But the URI remains. And we can spread backups, share the content, even when the hosts vanish, because the web is so cool like that.




> Is it a problem? Right now it doesn't seem to be a practical problem.

It will be the day these image hosting services die (and they do, all the time). This setup separates the post content from the post itself. I hope that most of us remember what a giant mess hosting images for forums on free image hosting services (that were later shut down) caused.

Apparently there was a discussion just a few days ago about Imgur deleting images that are not associated with a user account[1]. Just imagine all the broken image embeds that will cause…

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35636190


this reply feels 1 step behind my post.

i already mentioned imgur. i already spent a while talking through how we adapt & deal with this. i tend to think the way forward isn't to change our user behavior or the pattern, but to layer user-sovereign resilience atop the web, which we already have wonderful examples of aplenty.

the Axioms of Web Architecture help us cope & iterate with emerging situations well, are a strong start for resilience layers. https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html

and reciprocally, i'm not saying it's a solved problem either.




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