Host-held history
Symptom
You filed the bug. The screenshot rendered. Months later you cannot find it without the host’s UI — or the CDN link died, or the org revoked access, or the agent cannot RAG against “everything I ever submitted” without scraping.
The pain is not “GitHub is bad at images.” The pain is history that only the host can search, while the consumer holds no API-shaped copy.
Diagnosis
Same family as An alternative to URLs: the pretty host page is a label; the thing (body, attachment bytes, thread identity) should remain reachable under consumer-controlled wires.
Forge-native upload (gh --attach) correctly improves live filing.
It does not replace ownership of a searchable backup.
Treatment (near term)
-
Keep submission markdown + media in a personal archive (
.issuessubmissions /images/). -
Opt into forge metadata/body backups (Issues Browser).
-
Prefer provider search APIs when they exist; do not pretend a private disk dump is the end state.
Treatment (north star)
Data providers expose fuzzy → vector/hybrid search as a first-class surface. Consumers can opt into mirror backups that mimic the provider’s data shape and API. Privacy law and portability norms push toward usable export — not locked HTML.
Building the open path as a demo (portable archives, then API-compatible mirrors) argues against “the business owns your data and hides it from you” on legal, cultural, and tooling grounds.