Twitter no longer allowing links to your Mastodon profile? Let's bypass that

raccoon.onyxbits.de

41 pointsiamnotdave4 comments

By this logic, any of the hundreds of URL shorteners out there could be used.

It's not difficult to follow a redirected URL one hop to find its 301/302 location header and then ban the source URL as well as the redirection site.

IMO it'd be more robust to list your Mastodon profile as a slightly obfuscated string of text, like people have done to fight spam bots when listing email addresses. E.g. [@]User(at)home{dot}social

Could, but two (minor) disadvantages:

1. The age old privacy debate of letting the shorteners track you. 2. The url is, well, obfuscated.

Also while it's nice that this shortener doesn't obfuscate where the link goes, in general url shorteners make it easier to run malicious sites. Yes, it's ridiculous that Twitter is marking Mastodon sites as unsafe. But if something is marked as unsafe, and you use a url shortener to link to it anyway, it is terrible security on Twitter's part to not also mark the shortened link unsafe.

By now it should be obvious, that the bird is going to drop dead out of the sky.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com