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Comment by Aspos | Hacker News Reader

Awesome. Would suggest considering a built-in URL shortener.

I know the URLs are long compared to what people are used to. Part of the rationale for putting this out there in the current state is I'm curious if people in practise will share long URLs or not.

At some point I'd like to add shortlinks but at the moment everything is clientside, there's no persistence at all (beyond localStorage). I think that's a nice feature from a security perspective.

Not too short or it's too easy to guess.

The app might be stateless right now (I haven't checked); if it is, adding a URL shortener will break that.

How about zipping the state string or, even better, putting it into a KV storage thus exchanging it for a 10-char string.

Correct me if I'm wrong but zipping it would mean it would be encoded in a way that wouldn't be usable as a URL. The state is currently compressed and URL encoded via lz-string fwiw/in case you're curious.

Ha, I was going to say is that url query string a sha256 or something.

Yeah it's compressed and encoded with `lz-string` but I know it's hideous - I'm curious if that will prove a practical problem for adoption, even if a technical crowd isn't fond of the choice. Surprisingly most messaging apps you paste urls into these days don't show the whole thing anyway - when you paste it'll transform the link into a small preview card with just the domain portion of the URL visible.

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