Hello!
Latest work by @tasty and @mfreitas commited to twister repositories implement the first (afaik) decentralized URL shortener!
How it works:
- The full URL is stored in a separate ´url´ field within a special post (a twist without any text). The shortened version refers to this post number and user.
- This is what a shortenet twister URL looks like: twist:QwAAAN0DAAA=
- The above short URL then expands to https://theintercept.com/2016/03/18/brazil-is-engulfed-by-ruling-class-corruption-and-a-dangerous-subversion-of-democracy/
- twister-html will detect “twist:” URIs and automatically request twister-core to decode then (by means of retrieving the original post)
Then, another experimental feature has just been added today: long (> 140 characters) post.
Long post is not yet (at time of writing) enabled in twister-html UI. There is an ongoing discussion here on what limits should be imposed instead of the old one.
Unfortunately, unlimited post size are not possible due to technical limitarions of the protocol.
Should I use URL shortener or a long post including the URL?
That´s a good question, both alternatives have advantages and disadvantages:
- Long posts, which use more than 768 bytes after encoding may be recused by some nodes, causing then to not being added to “mentions” lists, for example.
- Note UTF8 may expand to more bytes on non-latin languages and some overhead is added as well (like sender fields, signature etc).
- URL shortened special post is added to torrent and DHT. However DHT may expire it after two weeks, causing delays on URL resolver. posts with URL as text have no such problem.
So stay tuned! We´re working on these.
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