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.
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.