I’ve had several conversations with people surrounding go links recently, over on Twitter and Matrix; that made me realize I’ve been procrastinating on writing something about them, so here I am. Procrastination over.
Before I lose you, let me tell you outright why I think go links could be interesting or even important to you:
Did that pique your interest? Then read on.
go links originated within Google around 2005 or 2006. They are the invention of Benjamin Staffin, an SRE (like yours truly); as detailed in his interview with Jon Gaulding from trot.to, they were inspired by AOL keywords and were designed to scratch an itch that Benjamin’s team was experiencing at the time: people kept asking for trivial redirects to internal pages that were relatively work intensive to set up. Go links emerged as self-service named redirects, essentially: a web service that sets up a redirect from a chosen label (e.g. go/agora) to a target URL (e.g. https://flancia.org/agora) . From Google they spread to many other companies, particularly around Silicon Valley. If you walk around their offices (well, if you did before Covid-19 anyway) you will see them in wide use.
In many ways, a go link is like any randomly generated "short link" you can get nowadays around the web as offered by a number of services like <bit.ly>: you can create them quickly, they can point to any valid URL, and they tend to be shorter than the URLs they link to. So far so good. But they have some extra attributes:
go/go-links-history is better than https://bit.ly/3iyrl9e as a pointer to https://www.trot.to/blog/2020/07/09/go-links-origin-story/.go/agora is better than https://bit.ly/33Q5F4l as a pointer to https://flancia.org/agora ) marked as public, and offer users a way to cross-link nodes with other users’ (see also the federation point below).
TLDR: Roam/Wikis/Docs/Twitter plus go links = lightweight distributed social knowledge graph that builds on these platforms but is not directly controlled by any of them.
If you accept one or more of the hypotheses implied above (that go links can be directly useful to users; that they complement existing tools and platforms well; that they might benefit from network effects), further venues for thought seem to open up:
Expanding this section will automatically generate an AI synthesis of the contributions in this node.
Rendering context...
Placeholder redirect for [[go]] (and possibly [[go link]]) on [[agora]], especially for my [[digital garden]]
If you accidentally linked this in a Obsidian page (or even in your agora-integrated digital garden),
| go link | Type | Target | Description | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
go/ddevault |
Public go link | go/sircmpwn |
go link alias | ||
go/discord |
Public go link | https://wiki.andreijiroh.xyz/garden/discord | Public go link | https://discord.gg/XgAUBmH | Yugipedia Discord server invite link |
go/dotfiles |
Public go link | https://mau.dev/andreijiroh-dev/dotfiles | Dotfiles repo shortlink | ||
go/edit |
Public go link | go/edit/workers |
go link alias | ||
go/edit/links |
Public go link, gated access via Cloudflare dashboard | Workers KV for golinks in general | |||
go/edit/workers |
Public go link | https://dash.cloudflare.com/cf0bd808c6a294fd8c4d8f6d2cdeca05/workers/services/edit/golinks/production |
Edit link to production code for golinks on Cloudflare dashboard | ||
go/story8 |
Public go link (mirror for tailnet) | TBD | [[Gildedguy Story 8]] YouTube video | ||
go/today |
Tailnet-only go link | https://stellapent-cier.fawn-cod.ts.net/garden/daily-notes/{{.Now.Format "2006-01-02"}} |
Today’s draft entry on daily note |
These wiki-specific go links can be accessible by prefixing them with https://wiki.andreijiroh.xyz/go/ (also works on main website).
TODO: add wiki-specific links