Fedi.Tips
@FediTips@social.growyourown.services  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

You probably should not use link shorteners, here's why:

- All links on Mastodon count as 23 characters no matter how long they really are. There is no need to shorten links on Mastodon, it won't save you any space.

- Link shorteners endanger privacy by allowing click tracking, and by hiding what is actually being clicked.

- Shortener providers will shut down, breaking all their links. e.g. Google's shortened links will all show 404 errors from September: https://chaos.social/@root42/114929876895398208

#FediTips
Fedi.Tips
@FediTips@social.growyourown.services replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

p.s. Just to make this extra clear, by "link shortener" I mean services like bit.ly etc which replace your link with a totally different link via their service.

I do not mean manually shortening links by removing trackers. It's totally 100% fine to manually shorten links to remove trackers, people should do that, and that's not what I'm posting about.