@beka_valentine @moderation hotlinking dies to link rot, replication doesn't. Hotlinking dies to malicious actors too.

@jonn @moderation sure, i mean that's obviously an issue! but fixing it shouldn't be done by defaulting to centralizing mechanisms

hotlinking should be the default, with archival mechanisms as the fallback only

@beka_valentine perhaps. In my personal experience, I *wish* there was a bunch of servers who'd have backed up my posts and stuff I was hosting on bare metal. So I guess I'm too jaded by the experience of losing data.

@jonn i mean there are! the internet archive will do that for you. but it's not designed to backup dynamic content so you'd have to do something to deal with that. that's a design flaw in mastodon tho

@beka_valentine oh, it doesn't back up obscure pages though.

@jonn yes it does, you just have to explicitly request it. it tries to archive everything it can, but it might not *find* stuff, which means you have to explicitly tell it to archive it

@beka_valentine oh noo... I wish I knew...

@jonn yeah. im sorry you've lost content. :(

but check it just in case! it might have captured it!

ALSO! you can just upload stuff to the archive, without even using the wayback machine. you can just archive things, as long as you're OK with them being public

also also, use github

there are so many options

@beka_valentine I'm older and smarter about backups now. I think it was an important experience anyway. Besides, there's a decadent pleasure in vaguely remembering the content that nobody will ever see. Death before death.