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pmachinery

Not sure if it's what you mean, but:

(hashify) 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2464213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3407197

(shortly) 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3834643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5696127

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Yes, that's what I mean. But only Hashify still exists apparently...

Yeah, the pages linked from those HN links don't seem to exist, but you can still download it:

https://github.com/lucaspiller/shortly

I was always quite fascinated by the concept, but I suspect liability and lack of control over the content is a fatal issue and why nothing much seemed to come from it.

If someone makes a 'bad' page, which is inevitable, the domain with the hashify/shortly code would be held responsible and the only way the site owner could 'remove' the content would be to stop the service.

> Storing a document in a URL is nifty, but not terribly practical. Hashify uses the [bit.ly API][4] to shorten URLs from as many as 30,000 characters to just 20 or so. In essence, bit.ly acts as a document store! [1]

bit.ly et al. seem to be able to get away with being agnostic processors. I'm surprised there haven't been more stories about their services being abused.

[1] https://hashify.me/IyBIYXNoaWZ5CgpIYXNoaWZ5IGRvZXMgbm90IHNvb...

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