@panoramax @Yrrussaj I understand, thank you for replying. :)

I'm just wondering how useful this is for OSM in the long term, since the panoramax=* tag is a hard link.

If, say, there'll be an instance focusing on the German territories, and it shuts down after a couple of years for some reason, will all OSM apps suddenly lose all volunteer data about Germany accumulated over half a decade?

And even if it was backed up and restored somewhere else, we'd need to change all hard links from the old instance to new, working ones.

I am not sure, but wouldn't a UUID approach per-picture similiar to Wikidata be a better idea than hard linking a single host? That way you could have multiple, distributed sources for the same image just based on its identifier, at least.