Tiny links are cool because:

1. they're smaller, and
2. they don't rely on the page title to link to content.

According to this page, Confluence's tiny links are generated by encoding the content ID of a page. Because this encoding is reversible, a page's content ID can be found directly from the link by Confluence without a database lookup.

Unfortunately the (fairly common) scenario of migrating from self-hosted Confluence to Confluence OnDemand requires space imports, which means all content gets new IDs. This invalidates the 'tiny' part of all the tiny links someone may have used in other systems to link to their wiki content. If they had used non-tiny links, they could simply change the base URL part of the links, but now even that will not be sufficient to get the old links working again.

This is a missed opportunity to make tiny links resilient. The tiny part of the link should be hashed and stored in the database in such a way that it comes across with a space import.