Ok, so I'd like something like a self-hosted njump but with server side rendered pages and much shorter URLs. Both make it easier to share via e.g. whatsapp and get nice previews.
Discussion
Shortening could be done by e.g.:
/e/ for nevent, /p/ for nprofile, etc
Followed by just enough first letters that it's unique.
This works especially well for self hosting because the number of events would be limited (e.g. a whitelist of npubs of yourself and some alt accounts).
A public service could offer this as a SAAS: you get a short URL and (static) server side rendered page for any event/profile you visit, with a cookie to track your balance, NWC or something nuts.
why can't the public njump offer this already?
I think it's all client side javascript rendering, which doesn't play well with social media previews. It probably also doesn't have a database, so nowhere to store short url to long url mapping.
I do use njump.me to share posts all the time and get previews everywhere, even telegram instant views which are pretty good, so it must have at least some server side rendering
I was thinking about alternative URLs just yesterday (for a different, but similar use case). I think it should still support the full URL and reference it as the canonical one via `link rel="canonical"` in the HTML. You also need the full URL to link out to other clients from there anyway.