Another design consideration re: Mastodon is that it works well for ephemeral asynchronous communications, but for many reasons should not be counted on as an archival resource. Media attachments are periodically purged and may not be available after a week, or a month, etc. While some servers may try to preserve content forever, this may be costly and unsustainable. Creators, researchers should treat this as an ephemeral resource and make provisions for self-archiving anything important.
A great point. A few days ago I wrote if we can have something like #DOI for #toot posted on #fediverse. Assigning a DOI is fine but there needs to ways to make sure these are persistent. Then there are issues around evaporating instances, here today, gone tomorrow. So spreading status updates on more than one instance is in order.
