Third-party #LinkShortener / #URLshortener services are the web equivalent of open email relays with the added disadvantage of introducing #LinkRot when the link creator’s account is closed or the service shuts down entirely. They’re magnets for #spam, #scams, and #malware distributors.
If you have a legitimate need for shortened links (posting to #Mastodon isn’t, see previous post), run your own that you and your users can trust.
Occurred to me while reading some thick non-fiction #books:
In the age of "#depublication" and accidental #LinkRot, authors of articles and books who cite online sources really ought to #archive snapshots of all the material they cite. The web today isn't a #library, it only pretends to be.
In case you missed it, all links on Mastodon count as 23 characters towards your limit, no matter how many characters the link really is.
So, you don't need to use link shorteners on Mastodon as they won't actually affect the link's length.
Mastodon does this because it's better for everyone's privacy to avoid link shortener services, it means people can see what they're clicking on, and the link won't stop working if the shortener service shuts down.
Another #linkrot pattern that I've observed quite frequently in research is material hosted on university "personal page hierarchies". If I see a link in a paper or on a discussion that's of the form university.edu/ilastname/project then there's an 80% chance it's dead.
Lots of attention in #OpenResearch gets paid to people not posting their code at all; seems like the "university free hosting plan" problem gets disproportionately ignored, IMO....
@n8
> Another LinkRot pattern that I've observed quite frequently in research is material hosted on university "personal page hierarchies". If I see a link in a paper
Referencing any web link in a draft paper that isn't relatively permanent (eg DOI, web.archive.org, webcitation.org, archive.is) ought to be brought up as an issue during peer review.
#LinkRot for #podcasts is worse than I thought. The decay seems especially noteworthy for those that use services to obfuscate links to their files.
If people don't want their podcasts to disappear they need to be proactive. One way is to archive your stuff at @internetarchive.
Podcast feeds should include links to backup files but I haven't found a standard element to represent those, either with podcast specific feeds or #RSS in general.