Anybody know what the real reason for this is?
All websites can track how often a link is clicked, and what the link is, and who clicked it (especially if you have an account).
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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It's to get around a bug on some platforms where the Referer header isn't set properly. Basically when you click the link in the app (maybe other platforms too idk), it can't set the Referer, so website statistics can't know what came from bsky. This was in their changelog. It used to already work correctly on desktop, though.
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I use duckduckgo. It shows the sites I’ve visited, and tracking attempts. And, yes, there are tracking attempts from bluesky. There are no tracking attempts from lemmy.ca
https://www.howtogeek.com/118915/duckduckgo-isnt-as-private-as-you-thought/
Just gonna leave this here.
I use an app called URLcheck that I've installed via F-Droid. Although it doesn't appear to give me the ability to skip the bluesky redirect action but at least I know it's there I guess.
You can use pattern checker to automatically replace the URL with the original one.
"bsky": {
"regex": "https?:\/\/go.bsky.app\/redirect\\?u=(https?.*?)",
"replacement": "$1",
"decode": "true",
"enabled": "true",
"automatic": "true"
}
(it's possible they will add more parameters in future, in which case you may want to restrict the selection to not be essentially anything after u=)
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They never needed to redirect to do that in the first place. It's probably just done for convenience. Websites quietly tracking outgoing links has been technically possible since the '90s.
I mean, it was made by former Twitter execs... and that was marketed as an "advantage" over alternatives like Mastodon. This isn't surprising at all unless you literally don't pay any attention to anything.
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As someone who ran a popular link shortening platform let me tell you how difficult it is to curtail spam links.
This is likely a way to warn users before being forwarded to fraudulent websites that a link has been marked as spam.
There are many other use cases for this redirect as well but this is the most obvious for user safety.
Doesn't sound plausible to me—If they can detect spam links like you're suggesting, why not just mask those links as bsky short links?
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This is for publishers to track outgoing links.