• Greg Clarke@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    URL shorteners are but inherently bad. I find them useful. I self host them on domains I own. So they’re secure, trust worthy, I can track engagement, and I can update them if need be.

    Plus, I’m pretty sure Twitter forces you to use their shortener. My URL http://gho.st was “shortened” to a longer https://t.co/blahblah URL 😂

    • jarfil@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I can track engagement, and I can update them if need be

      That’s inherently bad as in:

      • Third party (you) tracking the user
      • Hiding the true target from the user
      • Destroying any attempt at content archival

      They’re not inherently bad “for you”, just for everyone else.

      • Greg Clarke@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Third party (you) tracking the user

        I’m not tracking users, I’m tracking engagement. I’m not Zuckerberg

        Hiding the true target from the user

        99.99% of website use a reverse proxy, the target is nearly always hidden. I don’t think you understand how the internet works.

        Destroying any attempt at content archival

        Who would archive a shortened URL and not follow the link to its target? It’s not my fault if people don’t know how to archive my content.

        URL shorteners are not inherently bad.

        • jarfil@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          I’m not tracking users, I’m tracking engagement

          Whose engagement? Anything on your server, you can track it with the access logs, do you know how the internet works?

          99.99% of website use a reverse proxy, the target is nearly always hidden. I don’t think you understand how the internet works.

          Do you know how a reverse proxy works? It doesn’t change the user-facing URL like a shortener.

          Who would archive a shortened URL and not follow the link to its target? It’s not my fault if people don’t know how to archive my content.

          Someone archiving the original content. It’s your fault for breaking the link at a whim.

          URL shorteners are inherently bad.

          • Greg Clarke@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            Whose engagement?

            The engagement with my presentation for instance. I don’t care about tracking specific users.

            It doesn’t change the user-facing URL like a shortener.

            Where the user-facing URL points can easily be changed! For instance, changing the DNS record or changing where the reverse proxy points. I really don’t think you understand how the internet works under the hood.

            Someone archiving the original content. It’s your fault for breaking the link at a whim.

            I’m not going to optimize my content for lazy archivers. Check out web.archive.org for an example of how to properly archive, they update the URLs so links don’t break

      • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
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        1 year ago

        Third party (you) tracking the user

        No, he’s not a third party, he’s the second party in this context because you visit his own website, hosted on his own server.

        • jarfil@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          On his own website, hosted on his own server, he has server logs to track whatever he wants, change whatever content he wants to display, and do whatever else he wants.

          The only reason to use a URL shortener, is to interpose himself between his server and someone else’s server, meaning to become a third party to the relationship between user and other server.

      • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I see zero reason why others would be entitled to archive your content, nor hiding the true target from the user. Those are not bad things.

    • deepthaw@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      I work for a college. We use our internal link shorteners to make sure a given link points at the latest version of a resource and measure engagement by seeing what is the best way to get important information to our students and faculty. (Did people actually click on that announcement in our LMS?)

      They’re terribly useful for us.

      • Greg Clarke@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        This obviously depends on the context. For instance, I’m speaking at a public event and I put a link up on a presentation to my website. The website is running on my nginx server so I could already track every visit. Having a shortened URL helps me gauge the value of my talk. It’s not black and white

    • mom@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      I self host them on domains I own.

      I’ve been trying to get a short domain to do exactly that, do you know any good brokers?