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> showed no activity in late 2024

Apparently they measured it once by running a map-reduce or equivalent.

I don’t see why they couldn’t measure it again. Maybe they don’t want it to be gamed, but why?

I interpreted "inactive" as the link that the shortener is linking to is not responding.

No. Inactive means that the short URL hasn't been accessed in a while.

But that doesn’t make any sense. A link might be printed in a book. Nobody accessed it, yet they might at some point. Such a service is quite good for printing in books, instead of QR-codes.

It makes sense in a technical capacity, not in an epistemic one. I never claimed it is the right thing to do.

If I had to guess it is possibly something to do with fighting crawlers/bots/etc triggering the detection? And running some kind of more advanced logic to try ensure it's really being used. Light captcha style.

But just a guess.

Archive Warrior is actively scanning all links to try and preserve them. 2.5 billion have been processed at the time of writing

https://tracker.archiveteam.org/goo-gl/