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Jabrov | 7 months ago

Has there ever been one that survived for a really long time?

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reddalo|7 months ago

Three random examples that come to my mind:

- Tinyurl.com, launched in 2002, currently 23 years old

- Urly.it, launched in 2009, currently 16 years old

- Bitly.com, also launched in 2009

So yes, some services survived a long time.

cestith|6 months ago

I’m sure there are many self-hosted ones for corporations, shortening only their own URLs. There are only a few public ones.

Imustaskforhelp|7 months ago

Honestly, that's a great question

I think I might be doing a self plug here, so pardon me but I am pretty sure that I can create something like a link shortener which can last essentially permanent, it has to do with crypto (I don't adore it as an investment, I must make it absolutely clear)

But basically I have created nanotimestamps which can embed some data in nano blockchain and that data could theoretically be a link..

Now the problem is that the link would atleast either be a transaction id which is big or some sort of seed passphrase...

So no, its not as easy as some passphrase but I am pretty sure that nano isn't going to dissolve, last time I checked it has 60 nodes and anyone can host a node and did I mention all of this for completely free.. (I mean, there is no gas fees in nano, which is why I picked it)

I am not associated with the nano team and it would actually be sort of put their system on strain if we do actually use it in this way but I mean their system allows for it .. so why not cheat the system

Tldr: I am pretty sure that I can build one which can really survive a really long time, decentralized based link shortener but the trade off is that the shortened link might actually become larger than original link. I can still think of a way to actually shorten it though

Like I just thought that nano has a way to catalogue transactions in time so its theoretically possible that we can catalogue some transactions from time, and so basically its just the nth number of transaction and that n could be something like 1000232

and so it could be test.org/1000232 could lead to something like youtube rickroll. Could theoretically be possible, If literally anybody is interested, I can create a basic prototype since I am just so proud really that I created some decent "innovation" in some space that I am not even familiar with (I ain't no crypto wizard)

ameliaquining|7 months ago

You can't address the risk that whoever owns the domain will stop renewing it, or otherwise stop making the web gateway available. Best-case scenario is that it becomes possible to find out what URL a shortened link used to point to, for as long as the underlying blockchain lasts, but if a regular user clicks on a link after the web gateway shuts down then they'll get an error message or end up on a domain squatting site, neither of which will provide any information about how to get where they want to go.

wizzwizz4|7 months ago

> which can last essentially permanent

Data stored in a blockchain isn't any more permanent than data stored in a well-seeded SQLite torrent: it's got the same failure modes (including "yes, technically there are a thousand copies… somewhere; but we're unlikely to get hold of one any time in the next 3 years").

But yes, you have correctly used the primitives to construct a system. (It's hardly your fault people undersell the leakiness of the abstraction.)

tqi|7 months ago

1) i think this means every link is essentially public? probably not ideal.

2) you don't actually want things to be permanent - users will inevitably shorten stuff strings didn't mean to / want to, so there needs to be a way to scrub them.

OutOfHere|7 months ago

It's not useful if the resulting URL is too long. It defeats the purpose of a URL shortener. The source URL can just be used then.