@feditips Thank you for this! :)

@feditips Additional downside of link shorteners: If they go offline (temporarily or permanently), you can’t use their links.

@feditips WOW, great

@feditips
Oh, cool! Thanks for the info.
I don't use shorteners, but it's good to know that 23 character thing.

@feditips Yep, good points. But I wouldn't mind of masto could allow real hyper-linking so I could post URLs-- to keywords or other content without burning 24 rendered chars to do it. Yes, it would need malware filtering, but that's pretty standard art today.

@feditips Many warm thank yous to you, wonderful people. #privacy

@feditips
Or that they don't know that is a feature of mastodon. I have been on here for four years and did not know that.

@feditips
Heh, I wouldn't discount the use of goodwill shorteners like #Envs for badly formed URLs, as an exception. Although, when you copy from address bar, browsers would make sure to make link compatible with standard, so it's pretty rare you'd ever end up with such a URL.

@feditips There are many reasons to use link shorteners besides tracking. Some people use software that can post to multiple social profiles, some of which may not treat links the way Mastodon does. Others may need to provide a link frequently, and a short URL is easier to type and clearer about its purpose than the real URL (e.g. John Hodgman is notorious for making bit.ly links for everything, especially tickets for live shows). Please don't vilify people with generalizations.

@feditips That's false in one particular instance, and that is the personal URL shortener, which is not used for tracking purposes, but for the purposes of stamping your identity onto your posts; I use as my own personal short domain, cp90.us, and anything posted which links to my blog will use that. The plugin for Wordpress for Fediverse posting supports it, for God's sake.

@feditips this is really important information! A lot of people don’t understand what’s wrong with link shorteners…

@feditips never click in link shorteners, you dont know what is hiding there. And its crucial to see the domain complete...

@feditips whoa didn't know that. Good to know.

@feditips ooh thanks for the tip did not know this... not like shadow uses any url shorterners anyways but spreading the info is very helpful

@feditips what about other platforms in the fediverse?

@feditips I always think of them as phishing attempts.

@feditips This is great to know!

@feditips the official mastodon app also limits you to a character count of 500 even if you mastodon instance character limit is higher then that. For example my personally mastodon instance has a character limit of 20,000.

@feditips @aishasie it baffles me how many people kept using them on twitter after they made urls count as a fixed length. It’s annoying to create them and annoying to use them because they obscure the target (and add tracking).