Keeping your links alive for the long term

Short links outlive the posts they appear in. Someone finds an old message a year from now, taps the link, and either arrives somewhere useful or hits an error. You usually never hear about the second case.

The most common cause is the destination moving. Sites reorganise, pages get renamed, and the address you shortened stops resolving. It is worth occasionally opening your older links and checking they still land somewhere.

Avoid pointing short links at anything temporary: a file in a personal cloud folder, a page behind a login, a URL with a session token in it. Those work perfectly when you test them and fail for everyone else.

If you must replace a destination, keep the alias and change what it points to. The alias is the part other people have saved.