Link previews make messages go kaboom.

[darthschmoo]

Whenever a user tries to paste a one-time link into any of a number of communication apps (Facebook, Signal, others) the application "helpfully" tries to read the URL to create a preview. Which sends the message to the shredder.

I don't know if it's possible to identify link preview attempts as such, and return some sort of alternate data (that ideally is agnostic about whether the requested page exists).

Another approach might be to modify the recipient's landing page so that it only indicates that a message is ready to be viewed (or, more agnostically, "here's a code you can try, maybe there's a message associated with it"), but the recipient has to click to actually open and read the message.

An advantage to the second approach is that the landing page has the opportunity to educate the reader about the ephemeral nature of the message they're about to request, before the countdown timer starts.

For context, I use the installation at secrets.xmission.com, and I'm not sure how up-to-date it is.

Thoughts?

[gdiamond]

For anyone looking for a workaround, the workaround is to add a password to your message.