- cross-posted to:
- BoycottUnitedStates@europe.pub
You must log in or register to comment.
This is for publishers. They announced this openly.
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.
I noped out the second I heard Dorsey was involved. Don’t care he isn’t anymore, it got the Techbro ick! Eurgh 🤢
Fucking same! It baffles me how dumb people can be over and over again
I’ve given up trying to save people from obvious traps. They refuse to listen and they refuse all data.
What is wrong wth a fucking discount code to show where you hot the referral.
I refuse all cookies everywhere and the internet works just fine.
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?
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.
Funny how people keep saying it’s not enshittification right up until the point where they choke to death on shit.
For reference you can disable this with unlock origin https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/pull/27500
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.
A centralized platform did something? Must be bad. The post title primes that reaction.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
it’s the only way
lol. Citations needed. Pretty sure this is JavaScript 101.
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.
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.
Removed by mod
Bluesky has been doing enshitification since it didn’t mind having that transphobic man on their platform, as far as I’m concerned.
which one?
Guessing we’re talking about Jesse Singal. The man who was banned and then allowed back in after negotiating directly with bsky staff.
That’s the one. It’s a while back I left now.
Jesse Singal. The other person that replied reminded me. When I left his being allowed to be on the platform was a bit of thing.
fuck it’s almost like the world runs on capitalism
Yeah, we need to do something about that.
state funded internet service and social media?
Ideally people funded.
Honestly not much of a functional difference between modern states and corporations.
States just do their best to pretend to be democratic while also being mechanisms of control and furthering the siphoning of all material wealth to the rich.
Yes even the social democratic states work like that, and it’ll get way more obvious soon.
The state is publicly funded, but yeah, it is better if the public can solve a problem without the state or without oligarchs like Elon involved.
Glad to be a citizen of the chadiverse.
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
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
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.
Removed by mod
