Bluesky already doing enshittification

This has absolutely nothing to do with enshittification. Bluesky doesn't need that redirect to know what you're clicking on. You're already on their platform, they can already track every single click that you do while on Bluesky including navigating to outbound links. I'm a bit shocked that nobody here is calling that out to be honest

As predicted.... And people piled on me here when I question why they were falling head over heels over bluesky when it was yet another techo bro platform

Glad to be a citizen of the chadiverse.

This is not enshittification. Many other knowledgeable users who actually know what they're talking about have explained why.

There is a legitimate reason for this: it’s the only way to provide content creators with evidence of how many people actually clicked on the link.

The downside is that there is so many ways that a feature like this can be abused by BlueSky in ways that can hurt users.

This is for publishers. They announced this openly.

They already know your IP address, you're using their website/app.

It's either to track outbound clicks (And potentially block them if they're harmful, YouTube and Steam do that), or a much more unlikely option is to hide the referrer from the target site (Since browsers have better ways to handle that now, but old ones don't)

Didn't take long for the expected to happen.

Anything under direct corporate control will enshittify. It has nothing to do with mission, values, direction, purpose, or any other bullshit in the charter of a service. If it is controlled by an entity with shareholders turning a profit, it will enshittify, because those shareholders will demand ever increasing profit for their investments. It is a one-way process.

Bluesky has been doing enshitification since it didn’t mind having that transphobic man on their platform, as far as I’m concerned.

Even if it didn't go to bluesky.app first before the actual link, clicks on it can still be made to be tracked. It's trivial to do it much more discreetly.

It is definitely tracked, but I would guess that turning it into a bluesky link has other uses, not all nefarious, such as: link previews, caching, dealing with dead links.

For reference you can disable this with unlock origin https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/pull/27500

fuck it's almost like the world runs on capitalism

Never follow social media to a second location.

Oh, there is so much more you can do with this "functionality". Welp, anyone who trusts bluesky even an inch better prepare to be deeply disappointed.

How is this enshittification? As far as an end user is aware nothing has changed right?

Yeah, this is why BlueSky's openness is always only to a point. I will say it's probably not as bad as some are making it out to be, but it's definitely not something you want to see from a platform purporting to be open. Fortunately this is only a BlueSky thing and not the entire AT Protocol... but at this point, the AT Protocol and BlueSky are inseperable. I mean, are there even any other AT Protocol sites?

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.

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

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).

Eh. Doesn't seem too bad, but then again, I haven't made an account there because of it not really being decentralized enough for my taste.
Seems kinda dumb to go from one centralized service like X to another. Bluesky's claims of being decentralized are highly exaggerated.

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.

Bluesky never felt quite right.

Wolves in sheep's clothing.

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.

This is for publishers to track outgoing links.

That was fast

You mean the company that was created by the worst of pre-Musk Twitter leadership, that claims to be open source and federated but actually isn't, that uses AI to moderate itself, and that has a policy that lets AI scrapers use your posts is actually bad? I'm shocked. Shocked!

It's time to delete Bluesky and use Mastodon full time!

How is this technically possible? When I hover over a link, my browser informs me it takes me somewhere; then when I click it, it takes me to go.bluesky. Is the destination changing at the moment the click occurs? Why are they hiding this?

Would the URLcheck app on android filter this out, or not because of the way it's being done?

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.trianguloy.urlchecker/

Absolutely shocked, no one could have predicted this

Doesn't this (at most) make it a bit easier for the destination site to track sources? It's been a couple decades since I did much web log analysis, but the referring URL is part of each log record I believe.

They wouldn't only want to know that a click came from Bluesky. They'd like to know all their referring sites, so the go.bsky.app redirect probably would be of little use unless it encoded something significant not present in the HTTP_REFERER header.

Isn't that what honey did in their app?

I’m using duckduckgo. Yes, it shows bluesky has trackers. lemmy shows NO trackers...

I'm shocked!

Well, not that shocked.

What else would happen. Lol

Bluesky really streamlined the process.