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Is that ultimately not the same as 404 – The resource you requested was not found, so here is a temporary placeholder?

Browsers, proxies and crawlers might remember 404 longer than any status code that has "temporary" in it. See also the various permanent and temporary redirect status codes.

404 is the temporary code. 410 is permanent.

Have you ever seen a 410 actually used IRL? This has to be one of those that's pretty high up in the code rarity list.

I've used it for resources that have been permanently deleted, rather than the 404 that you'll usually see. I think it makes sense for that sort of stuff.

From a user perspective, getting a 404 after following a link that previously worked can indicate a couple of things. Like maybe the resource still exists in some other place, but they didn't set up redirects. Maybe it's been "privated" in some way, and I no longer have access to it.

A 410 makes it explicitly clear to me, that the resource has been permanently deleted. It'd also be nice if the response included some metadata as to when the resource was deleted.

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