A Graveyard of Broken Links

One possible future for Steemit is a website with some great historical content interspersed with lots of broken image links.

I would like to stimulate some discussion on this particular risk and outline a few steps that each author can take today to reduce the risk that their content will become stale.

Image Source: https://pixabay.com/

I have been on Steemit for a few months and I am seeing broken links already. This is natural as websites age but I think it is something that everyone today should be taking precautions to reduce.
Googling "Steemit and images" there have been various issues with image links that have been fixed during 2016 and Steemit can always introduce changes and let you store media content somewhere else in the future.
@timcliff opened a github issue on where to store images https://github.com/steemit/steemit.com/issues/396 There are also plans I believe to integrate a way to upload photos directly when your posting using IPFS. I will describe IPFS below.

BUT....

What about all the archived posts?

More importantly what can you do today to reduce the impact for your posts from now until this enhancement is introduced?

Memory Loss

Image Source: https://bebrainfit.com/

Unique to Steemit (among blogging platforms) is that you cannot edit old posts so if a link goes stale you have no way of changing it. 404 errors and broken image links will resemble memory loss on Steemit. They will become a sign of ageing posts.

Real Risks

Companies go out of business all the time.
What would happen if the imgur or imgsafe servers were suddenly switched off? Sure I could start putting photos on a new site but all my old posts would have broken links and I couldn't fix them even if I could find the old photos!
Sites may block Steemit from linking to them, or may charge users for linking to them. Again this would involve updating old posts or suddenly having to pay fees to a hosting provider to continue to host your old photos. Imagine when Steemit becomes the go to social media platform, all these companies will want to get a piece of the action.

High Priority

There have been many posts about image uploads for Steemit but an integrated solution has not yet been implemented. It has not been high priority. The technology is here now with the Interplanetary file system (IPFS) and I would urge Steemit developers to make this integration a higher priority.
After all Steemit is a social media platform and a significant portion of the content for the platform is media.

What can Steemians do today?

You have two options, reduce the risk of stale links and use IFPS to store your photos or reduce the impact of stale links by using proper markdown.

Use IPFS

One solution to this storage problem is distributed storage using IPFS under the hood. This will not guarantee that a photo will always be available but it will mean that instead of relying totally on central hosting providers storing the photos the photo will be retrieved from a distributed network so it should greatly reduce the risk that a link goes stale. If you wanted to reduce the risk even further you could run an IPFS node on your computer with your photos stored there.

Image Credit: https://ipfs.pics/best

Background to IPFS?

Image websites that are generally recommended to Steemians today for storing photos are accessed using the internet protocol "HTTP". In a nutshell what this means is that the image is stored somewhere on a server in the websites data center.

When someone access your Steemit page their device connects to 2 things;

The Steemit Blockchain to get your article
but as your photo is not stored there
They also need to connect to the server where your photo is stored

IPFS works differently. The basic idea with IPFS is that even if the computer where the file of image is goes offline, the file may be still available on another computer and your image links on Steemit will still work. Its design also means your device probably will get the content faster.

@darknet gives a great intro to IPFS Why the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Steemit are so great together

The following video by Juan Benet from 2015 is also worth watching to get an introduction and motivation for the need for IPFS

Great I want to use IPFS!!!!!

How can you use IPFS today?

Until Steemit introduces image uploads as part of the interface you need to use other options. In @darknet s post above he also gives a step by step guide how to upload photos using the website https://ipfs.pics/ and how to link them in your post. This is the easiest way to use IPFS today and that site is what I will be using until Steemit integrates image uploads.

Use full Markdown syntax for images

An alternative to using an IPFS site to upload your images, if you want to continue to use your favourite upload site and wait for Steemit to introduce image integration, is to take steps to minimise the effect of stale links in your posts.

You may already be doing this but best practice for linking images is to include a name or description with your image link.
This means that even if your link is broken later your post will show the image name. In that situation it shouldn't look as as bad as if the image link is broken with no alt text. It also shows up while your image is loading.

Best Practice Markdown Syntax for Images
-----------------------------------------
![Image Name/Description](Image path)
e.g.
![Image of Yaktocat](https://octodex.github.com/images/yaktocat.png)

Sites to upload Images

For reference I am listing here the most popular options for storing photos for Steemit today (in no particular order)

@primus made a post a few months back Best 3 Image Hosting Sites for STEEM, where most of these links are taken from.

Thank you for reading this. I write on Steemit about Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Travel and lots of random topics.