Mastodon is adding a feature that will tag links with Fediverse ids. So if I post an article link, and the news site has the special meta tag, the. The journalist’s Fediverse is will be linked below the article’s embed in my post.

This is probably an effort to help journalists find their audience on independent social media, which would help the whole ecosystem.

But I still need a host to know where to retrieve the comment from. A GUID on its own doesn’t help if my instance hasn’t seen that comment. So if there’s a host already on the comment id, why bother with an ugly long GUID?

Run your own server with backups.