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.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.
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 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)
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
