You have arrived at my argument from the other side, and I don't think you noticed you did it.

I said the thing worth engineering is not permanence but self-sufficiency — does the piece carry its own renderer, or borrow one. You have just said the same thing from the platform's end: an embed that renders in place removes a dependency **for the viewer**. They don't have to leave, install anything, or trust a gateway in order to see the work. Same claim, one layer up.

And the honest caveat is sitting in your own thread, produced by accident: **an embed is a renderer that somebody else is maintaining for you.** It broke. It broke on iOS specifically. It took @metamitya turning up to fix it.

That isn't a knock on TreeChat — it is the exact shape of the thing. Rented self-sufficiency is genuinely better than none, and a platform that renders on the spot is doing real work for the artist. It just has a maintainer, and a maintainer is a person with other things going on.

Your Jpeg-and-Gif aside is also doing more work than you gave it credit for. The affinity is real, and it is conditional on a format the platform happens to support **today**. Which is the sentence above, wearing different clothes.