- cross-posted to:
- BoycottUnitedStates@europe.pub
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Glad to be a citizen of the chadiverse.
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
FUD is the name of the rage bait game.
I don’t know much about how any of this stuff works, so these are honest questions in good faith. But how did Bluesky know, before this change, that I clicked a link? Am I not just telling my browser to visit a website? I don’t really understand how it’s different from me copy-pasting the URL manually.
The same way that they know that you clicked on literally anything on their website.
It’s foundational to how the modern internet works (more specifically JavaScript)
For a more visual example, let’s say there is a button that makes an animation or changes color when you hover over it.
That is happening because of code running in your browser that was written by the website that served it to you, in order for the button to know to change, the code must know where your mouse is and if the mouse is hovering over the button.
Your browser, emits ‘events’ which the JavaScript code is able to interact with, these are things like keystrokes and mouse actions. The JavaScript running on the page can very trivially record these actions.
Every single way you interact with a website can be tracked, here is a commercial product that specializes in complete session recording (in theory to see how your users interact with your pages to make improvements: https://mouseflow.com/platform/session-replay-tool/
Am I not just telling my browser to visit a website?
Well yes, but actually no. You are clicking on a link, which, by default, will make the browser visit the website behind the link. But the website that shows you the link can have Javascript code in it, which runs in your browser and can, among other things, “intercept” clicks on anything and change what the clicks are doing.
This is how this redirect is happening in the first place. The links on Bluesky still point to the correct target site, but when you click one of them, JavaScript jumps in and changes the target of the navigation to the redirect domain. This is not necessarily to deceive you, it’s actually a good thing that you can still check the website you’ll end up at before you click, and you can still do things like right-click to copy the link manually this way.
That means that even without the redirect, JavaScript could for example not change the navigation target at all, and just send a tracking event to their servers in the background to let them know you clicked the link. This is how it works for most websites that use analytics. For the normal user this is totally invisible, and this is why I’m saying that bsky doesn’t need the redirect to track you. They could do that in a much less obvious way already. And for all we know, they probably are already doing that, as their privacy policy explicitly states that they can collect usage data like what links you click on.
All of this is pretty standard for any commercial service on the web, btw - knowing what your visitors/users are doing makes it much easier to see where your app might be having issues, what features need to be focused on to be improved, etc. It only gets shady if that data is also used for marketing or sold to third parties. And, to be fair, bsky’s privacy policy doesn’t really prevent them from doing that as far as I can tell. It’s just that all of this was already the case before the redirect, so it’s very unlikely that this specifically is suddenly a sign of oncoming enshittification.
Indeed. I have no doubt that BlueSky will eventually enshittify given that they are not truly non-commercial, but this is not an example of such a thing.
A centralized platform did something? Must be bad. The post title primes that reaction.
So why?
Facebook does the same, even in their own in-app browser to keep tracking you.
I don’t think that is true, iirc you can’t track simple clicks on HTML
aelements.With JavaScript you can track your precise mouse cursor movements. Many analytics products even offer that as an “session replay” feature to check how a user moved their mouse, or to see heatmaps of where people are pointing to.
Tracking actual clicks is obviously much more trivial.
Apart from using JavaScript, there’s also a way to track links in HTML
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/a#ping
TIL, thanks for sharing
with javascript you can just use an onclick.
Yes, you absolutely can, and it’s super simple. Click listeners are one of the most basic things you can do with JavaScript, and there’s nothing special about
aelements that would make them not work. The only way to stop it from the user’s side is to disable JavaScript in their browser, but that comes with the downside of the majority of websites and apps just plain not working anymore.
Just because they have other means of doing link tracking doesn’t mean they aren’t using this link proxying to track stuff.
I mean… Sure? They might, or they might not. My point is that pointing to this change as a sign of enshittification doesn’t make any sense, because it’s not changing anything about how they can track and exploit you. There’s nothing there to suggest that this is related to a change for the worse regarding enshittification.
If you want something to point to, take their privacy policy that allows them to collect your usage data and possibly use it for marketing purposes, not a random feature that likely has nothing to do with this.
So much for the claims I read that it would be a more open platform. I can’t see how this possibly benefits the users.
The product is
not open source and itis mainly controlled by a company through its servers and proprietary components. They own it. Even if they use some open protocols. They are about as open as OpenAI — they are not.This is technically incorrect (the best kind of incorrect?). Bluesky is open source, with the exception of the discover feed algorithm, which they claim must remain secret to prevent it being manipulated. There are open-source replacements for that feed available, so it’s open enough that it is theoretically possible to spin up a Bluesky replacement, albeit impossibly expensive.
Coming at it from another angle though, the product in any commercial social media product is you, so in that sense you’re right: the product is not open source. Either way, open source code is not some panacea that erases all risk of commodifying its users. Bluesky is a great example because while it is open source, that in absolutely no way prevents them from tracking their users.
Additionally, it looks like you can host your own instance too.
It’s kind of complicated. Bluesky doesn’t do anything the way the fediverse does, so a PDS isn’t a full instance, it’s just the way that your personal account interacts with the Bluesky service.
An analogy I used in another thread about Bluesky got way too complicated, but my starting point was that if Bluesky is a swimming pool, then hosting a PDS is bringing your own personal bucket of water from home. Ultimately, you’re still feeding it all into the one big pool that Bluesky owns, at least until somebody else builds another swimming pool (puts up the money to host a fully-fledged Bluesky replacement service) and you take your bucket over there.
On its own, the PDS doesn’t really do anything without the rest of the infrastructure behind it. You can’t go swimming in a bucket.
Bluesky is a trailer park. A PDS is a trailer. You can take it somewhere else, but you need somewhere to park it at night, and right now the only option is Bluesky.
Yeah. Bluesky works way more like how people seem to imagine the fediverse does, with PDSes being glorified dumb terminals accessing a (functionally, if not forever technically) centealized pool of content. Hosting a PDS is just shouldering some of the cost of BS’s last mile.
not even: a copy of everything on your pds has to be replicated by bluesky’s relay.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though, it removed the complexity behind instances and federation which is primarily the reason mastodon didn’t see mass adoption.
It isn’t federation, since not all nodes in the system have equal power (control). There is still a central authority that controls what the inferior nodes can do.
Contrast that with email servers where you can send a message from one server to another without a more authoritative node as a required middleman.
Claiming it’s a central authority when anyone can run a relay is a little disingenuous.
Is there a list of all the relays and appview servers run by other people for the community to use? I looked for one, but could find no evidence that others have actually hosted instances of these components for real use.
A pds can do a lot more than people suggest, but its not very effective.
Essentially, atproto has three distinct parts:
- A PDS, stores your posts, user, and handles authentication
- A relay, crawls every pds, and creates a “firehose” of data to build stuff with
- An AppView, an app built with data from the relay. bsky.app is an appview, flushes.app is another. whtwnd.com is a blogging appview
The relay is the main “centralised” part of the network, but its possible to use the network without it. whtwnd, for example, crawls PDSs directly, without a relay.
There’s more to it, but thats the basics.
There’s nothing to prevent someone from spinning up a lemmy or mastodon instance and tracking users either.
They’d get defederated quickly.
Most likely. That’s if people knew about. You could do it secretly.
Though I wonder if you were open about it, if people would accept it. Just say “hey, this instance doesn’t ask for donations, but we track and sell your info.” Maybe some users would be okay with that.
they can’t sell your info (from remote instances) without you agreeing to a privacy policy. Now, that most likely wouldn’t stop them, but it makes it harder legally.
Remote instances won’t have your IP or email, and other usage trend data. So that info could only be obtained by this hypothetical tracking instance. As for any remote content on other instances, that can just be scraped by anyone. You wouldn’t even need an account or instance to get that data.
I know, sure thats just what threads did.
Actually, you can host the App bit yourself, and piggyback off bluesky’s relay until another one pops up.
you’re right that this is likely to be used for tracking crap, but i wouldn’t write off the concept as only for that
for example, home assistant has https://my.home-assistant.io/ where you can set your home assistant URL and doc links (etc) link there, and then that site in turn automatically redirects to the correct place on your local home assistant
this could be used similarly by the fediverse: imagine my.join-lemmy.org where lemmy instances you’re not logged into redirected you to, which then in turn redirects to your home instance… that way, links across the web to lemmy would automatically redirect to your home instance
perhaps it’s not something that’s worth the trade off - centralising in some ways - but in federated platforms on the web it’s far from a write-off
They don’t need to redirect to click track. They could very easily do that on the front end and you wouldn’t even know it was being done.
Or we could start using ap:// links https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ef61/fep-ef61.md
So much for the claims I read that it would be a more open platform.
There’s no profit in an open platform. You only build these things to mine data.
Exactly.
It’s a for-profit company.
They care about your privacy like McDonald’s cares about your health: if you have any left then they’re not squeezing cash from you hard enough.
Talk to friends on Signal, invite your favorite The Atlantic reporter, use self-hosted or federated social networks.
Expecting privacy on corporate owned social media is like expecting to become a royal because you went to Disney World.
Don’t confuse the facade (social space for you and your friends/magical kingdom) with the reality (privacy stealing monetization factory/tourist juicer).
This is further supported by the fact that story that they made more money selling their “fuck zuck” shirts or whatever, than they did in their actual money making strategies of selling unique domains.
No VC investor is going to be okay with a merchandise company growth curve.
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)
Wouldn’t it be easier to just scan the original post for harmful links?
Then you have to scan every single existing known post every time a new link is blocked, if you redirect it through a bouncer it’s a single endpoint to block any link, regardless of the source of the post (since bluesky is in theory decentralized)
Interesting idea. Is that what devs & mods have commented about the system setup in update notes (if any?)? I’m not in web development, and not at all sure about what’s considered standard practice or new. Others seem to be commenting in a way that sounds as though they feel put out or deceived, but you’re saying it’s just a minor security protocol?
Could be that.
Could be big data. If you click a link to furaffinity on Bluesky, this change means they know your account visited that website, and they know you’re a furry. So they sell that data to Fursuits-R-Us. Then Fursuits-R-Us buys some feed priority with furry users, and now you’re seeing a lot of posts about Fursuits-R-Us. Ta-da, that’s the magic of feed-integrated personalised advertising. You get marketed to, and you don’t even know it.
You might think advertising fursuits is harmless. But what if The Heritage Foundation buy that data and that feed priority instead? Or what if a right-wing Twitch streamer just started a playthrough of Red Dead Redemption, so they pay Bluesky to promote their content to all accounts that are marked as politically naive Red Dead fans?
This is how elections are bought and sold.
No such thing as a free lunch, amirite? At least with the realization that your data is getting harvested like tuna by pirate fishing, you can purposely feed it bullshit to skew the metrics over time. If you want to get on the inside track of cheese sales, setup a program to search for cheese 1-3 hours/day during your time away from the terminal, and see how many sales of delicious brie/roquefort/edam/camembert/cheddar/emmentaler you get. Might as well get ads for delicious cheese wheels while you’re at it.
Websites can change
So either they are solving problems the most common browsers are solving or they are tracking clicks to sell user data. Somehow the latter sounds more likely, especially since they have no reliable source of income yet.
True, but at the same time it’s their app. They already know what profiles you’re looking at, what posts you’re viewing, and the images you view, knowing what links you’re clicking on is just another event handler.
track outbound clicks (And potentially block them if they’re harmful, YouTube and Steam do that)
Google & Meta & Discord doing the same?
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This doesn’t even make sense.
If you are on their domain they can see the things you click on, this is how websites and cookies work.
This isn’t nefarious, it’s the raving delusions of a tech illiterate idiot.
No.
You can see a link was loaded in the page. Link tracking is still needed to know if the link was clicked.
It can be an “on click” JavaScript event, or a redirect to a tracking site.
No, if you click a link that brings you to or from a site your IP is logged
Navigating the internet requires having and disclosing your IP address.
Sorry
The destination logs the IP. The source doesn’t see the click, because it happens in your client, not in their site.
Source: managed tens of thousands of sites and hundreds of thousands of servers for over 25 years.
Not true, many frameworks out there for tracking client side interaction, and not only clicks, also keystroke and even just mouse movements on the page….It is called RUM data. It works similar to google analytics.
Your splitting hairs at this point.
My point was without SOMETHING to track clicks, you… Don’t.
Sorry it came across like you thought it wasn’t possible when saying source website can’t see the data. With some pretty basic js it is trivial, but yea web server access logs won’t give you that detail… but hardly anyone runs a serious site with only serverside detail now, especially in a world with so much cdn and 3rd party integrations direct from the browser.
Wow so you need an IP to navigate the web and every site you visit sees that IP?
Thanks for explaining what I just explained!
They were correct though, you weren’t.
Which makes your cockiness that much funnier.
I’m going to educate you on what this is actually about.
You think it’s about tracking someone as they go about the web.
The article is about BLUE SKY tracking the links you click on their site. Two totally different things.
I host a page, you load the page and it has 5 links on it. You can click on any, all or none of the links and my server would have no knowledge of it because after the page has loaded that’s our communication finished. All my server can log is that you loaded the page with the links on it and they were sent to you. What you do with that is up to you.
JS or manipulating the links would allow me to track which ones you have clicked.
No, if you click a link that brings you to or from a site your IP is logged
No, clicked links that bring to a site do not log your IP. For that you would have to add some sort of JavaScript to intercept the click and then have some JavaScript execute a HTTP Request that passes that information (eg: HTTP POST). Then the IP can be grabbed via that request by the receiving server. Or more importantly, a tracking cookie.
When clicking a link, the browser may add to Origin header on the HTTP request (HTTP HEAD/GET) that goes to the link’s server. Or the link itself can have UTM parameters, but there’s no guarantee that ever gets back to the original server.
But the point is if you have a page with 1000 links on it, the server that serves you the page doesn’t know which one you clicked without JavaScript or reframing the link to go elsewhere, which is why this post exists.
Put perfectly. Had I not been on mobile…I would have written it just as lazily as I did.
Thanks for taking the time.
So why are they hiding it by changing the link with client-side code? Might not be nefarious, but why?
Most probably so that people don’t hover over the link and see that it doesn’t match, which might confuse them if they don’t know how redirects work.
Because that would break the “copy link” functionality.
Whatever gets them to see the truth
Never follow social media to a second location.
sometimes follow social media to a second location.
always follow social media to a second location
perhaps even a third or fourth location
The mistake was the first location to begin with, so might as well go all in.
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.
The direct counter to enshittification is interoperability: the ability to pack up your content (likes, followers, messages, uploads) and import it into another service provider.
Since Signal is open source and mostly FOSS, you can theoretically create a Signal fork that can import Signal backups. I know because this program can read such backups and convert them into other formats. Ideally, the Atlantic reporter could have exported a Signal backup with the offending group chat messages before they expired.
so Signal too?
Yes indeed.
What?
While Signal and the structure of how signal is managed has flaws.
It is not a coorporation and therefore has no need to enshitify
The Signal Foundation is not a corporation.
But Signal Messenger, LLC is indeed a corporation, and it operates officially as a subsidiary of the Signal Foundation. The Signal protocol, as well as the official app, is developed by the LLC and not by the foundation.
In any event, there is plenty of room for a future enshittification of Signal. Is it less likely than many other entities? That’s probably a fair statement. Is it impossible? Not in the least.
It’s a non-profit.
OpenAI was a non-profit. Then they built something that could earn a profit, stopped being a non-profit, and immediately began to enshittify.
The Susan G. Komen foundation is a non-profit that enshittified with a “pinkwashing” scandal.
“Corporation” is not the predictive factor. “Centralized” is. Any centralized system is subject to the shitty whims of the operators.
it’s a “non profit organisation”, just like OpenAI once was
The only thing I want from companies is just a little transparency and a paid option to opt out.
“Facebook is free, but we will mine the balls off your data, monitor everything you do, we will control your feed and you cant customise anything. Or for $20 a month, we wont mine or track you, your feed and how it works is totally customisable”
Just put a number to it and let me decide if my privacy and experience is worth the money.
20$ is ridiculous. 1-2 would be reasonable.
What they ask for isnt the point, just give me the option to decide for myself. 1
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.
Yeah, it’s literally the second step of enshittification, where platforms stop allocating value to users and start allocating them to publishers. This is still Bluesky expanding out its surveillance apparatus, something it will have every incentive to abuse later on like other platforms before it.
There is no way it isn’t already being abused, there are zero guard rails on it
Fucking typical, a move that hurts the platform long-term is being cheered for by ignorant idealists while the makers of its demise are already salivating and cartoonishly rubbing their hands in glee
The content creators themselves could use a link that goes through a counter if they really need it, no?
No, it’s not the only way. You could track the click with JavaScript.
The user can also block your tracking scripts. Besides, the user can share the link with friends, and you won’t be able to track them this way. I’m sure there are many other reasons why having a middleware is de-facto the industry standard.
The user can also block the URL target rewriting. Not sure what’s your point though, I said it’s not the only way, not that there are better ways.
Why do content creators need to see how many clicks they get?
It’s how a number of them get paid.
I think I would like to go back to social media before people were getting paid for it
I would like to go back to the 90s and 00s where the internet wasn’t being monetised at every fucking opportunity.
Thats the fediverse!
I don’t know. I’m happy that some very talented and knowledgeable people create content that makes my life a little better, and that they are able to do that thanks to the various forms of monetization.
it’s the only way
lol. Citations needed. Pretty sure this is JavaScript 101.
Trust me bro, we are not tracking you. Please trust me bro!
If the purpose of this feature was tracking, they could just use a JavaScript onclick handler.
That’s incorrect.
BlueSky relies on JavaScript to run (try turning it off and loading their site, it won’t even render). Click-through traffic is almost exclusively measured by JavaScript (e.g. Google ad “events”). This is the same as measuring other stats, like whether you lingered on a post before scrolling past it, or whether you opened another tab, or whatever.
Proxy links are absolutely a method of measuring traffic, and they’re a method that works even when the site has JavaScript disabled - but since that’s not how Bsky works, it’s not relevant.
Yeah that’s what I was thinking. There’s a bunch of ways to track what users are doing without needing to use referral links.
Seems to me the referral links are there to prevent honey cookie shenanigans.
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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.
“It’s better than the Nazi one” major selling point. The bar is so low, it’s under Satan’s foot.
Oh, there is so much more you can do with this “functionality”.
Like what? What would this redirect be able to do that they couldn’t already do just with their normal website/app?
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
I thought about it but lemmy seems more genuine.
No karma. No nothing. Just info.
This was more a Twitter vs BlueSky comparison… not against Lemmy, not sure I understand your comment
They’re against themselves. Lemmy is the closest thing. I heard there might be a similar choice being built but I don’t give too much of a shit because I never used any of that twatter shit.
Fucking same! It baffles me how dumb people can be over and over again
I noped out the second I heard Dorsey was involved. Don’t care he isn’t anymore, it got the Techbro ick! Eurgh 🤢
This is not enshittification. Many other knowledgeable users who actually know what they’re talking about have explained why.
I’m very curious what these knowledgeable users say.
Rule 1 of the internet is “check the link before you click” and these man in the middle forwarding systems make that impossible.
I have a different association with “enshittification” but I definitely don’t support this change because it’s a security problem, you’re totally dependent on their moderation to keep you from clicking sketchy links.
they’re in this very thread cmon man
I read that comment, but I know for a fact that’s not the only way to log clicks.
It’s not for bsky to log clicks…??? They can already do that without doing this bounce link because you’re using their app??? Like folks are we really doing this?
It’s for external websites to know that the click came from bsky. (E.g. if you click the link from the bsky app, without this trick it would like you just typed the URL in, since apps don’t provide a referral header)
“check the link before you click” and these man in the middle forwarding systems make that impossible.
generally not true… the link href (the thing the browser shows to the user) would be the original link… bsky hijacks the link with an onclick (or similar) handler so you can see where you’ll be taken before clicking
It’s not exactly enshittification yet. The service still mostly works. But it is an attempt to build a wall around the garden.
Fuck walled gardens. That shit got old years ago. At least with FB you could pretend you didn’t expect it. Maybe. If you’re oblivious, at least.
I don’t really see how. Other AppViews and custom clients don’t do this. Its just a few lines of javascript in the frontend.
Funny how people keep saying it’s not enshittification right up until the point where they choke to death on shit.
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.
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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).
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.
Yeah I saw it in some announcement from them, it’s this.
Not sure why they have it go through a redirect like that; you can just trap click events and do whatever with them, including sending tracking info back before sending the user to the new page.
So far no one seems to know what the real reason is. That is why there is a lot of guessing.
They said themselves its for publishers to track outgoing clicks.
Probably so bluesky can get affiliate money, either changing affiliate links with their own a’la honey or just tracking them to report to advertisers how much traffic is going through their platform to garner deals.
In other words, money
How would link hijacking help with that? They can just track/rewrite directly without going through an intermediate step. The other commenter’s explanation seems more plausible.
That’s literally what Honey did that caused the Internet to blow up about them a short while ago.
But do you have any evidence that Bluesky is doing that? It has nothing to do with this post.
I’m thinking they’d want to control misuse of the platform. Someone links malware and it is shared enough, they may want to be able to intercept that. At least, that’s what I’d want to be able to do.
i doubt it’d be for that: if it’s a malicious link, they can just remove the post/link from their platform and the same effect is achieved
best case scenario it’s planning for when atproto has more PDSes, front-ends, etc: in that case, a central place where all platform links go so that you can set your “home” server so that all links into atproto redirect to your home server
worst case it’s for tracking click through for advertising
Most companies implement for malicious link control. They can actively scan as needed and they can prevent users from going to any links deemed malicious. It also adds tracking for amount of clicks on a specific URL. There are more nefarious uses that others have stated redirection for paid links to them and user profile building for ad targeting
I, for one, am shocked that moving from one corporate owned social media to another corporate owned social media didn’t fundamentally change anything.
Well for one, most of the nazis stayed behind.
The current marketing strategy for Bluesky is to target disaffected left-of-center people.
This isn’t because Bluesky is the one moral company in all of capitalisim. Instead, it’s because they see an opportunity to grow their userbase (and income) by messaging to people who are likely to leave Twitter. It’s no different than the thousands of companies that put up Pride Month banners and then a month later they take them down and continue donating to right-wing politicians.
Bluesky isn’t your ally, they’re just the current company that is pandering to you.
I’m not saying they’re my ally or the solution to the internet. They’re a platform that is currently not containing as many nazis.
If a bar I’m in has aggressively drunk dudes in it, I can just go to the next bar over and have a good time. That bar doesn’t have to be fundamentally impervious to aggressive drunk dudes for this to be true and useful.
I mean, I’ve heard a enough words from Popper to know that there’s only two amounts of Nazis: none and too many for me.
I don’t think Bluesky has none
If you take it to such an extreme, there is undoubtedly at least one Nazi on Lemmy too.
