I think a happy medium is a link shortener that uses https://perma.cc/ for resolving and generating permanent short links (Internet Archive is a supporting partner).

> You give Perma.cc the URL of the page you want to preserve and cite. Our software visits that URL, preserves what's there, deposits it into our collection, and gives you a unique URL (e.g. "perma.cc/ABCD-1234") - a "Perma Link" - that points to the record in our collection. You then can use that Perma Link in your citation to give readers access to a stable, accurate record of the source you referenced, even if the original disappears from the web.

Related:

Cool URIs Don't Change (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49231809 - August 2026 (69 comments)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenURL

https://arks.org/

https://doi.org/

https://specs.ipfs.tech/ipfs-uri/

(TLDR You're building an OpenURL resolver on social rails with sharing capability, with functionality to fall back to generating your own OpenURL when a permanent ident does not yet exist; if implemented in this fashion, you don't even need to maintain state, as state is managed by the graph of OpenURLs in scope)