this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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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.
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.
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.
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