[vanderZwan]

I did something like this last year (maybe two years ago by now? time flies), but with LZString instead of gzip[0]. The original idea was actually someone else's on Mastodon (who knows, maybe it was OP? I think it was Ramsey Nassr though), but it was just B64 at first - I added the compression.

Then someone tried fitting King Lear in there (which worked).

Then it turned out that until that day but not for very long after that URLs were not counted for character limits in mastodon toots.

That froze quite a few Mastodon clients who were unlucky enough to open that toot for a day or two until that got fixed. Not sure why, I'm guessing (accidentally) quadratic algorithms that weren't counting on urls that were multiple kilobytes in length.

[0] https://blindedcyclops.neocities.org/onlinething/writer