All links on Mastodon count as 23 characters towards your post’s character limit, no matter how long they really are. Because of this, there is no need to use link shortener services such as bit.ly etc on Mastodon.
Mastodon counts all links as 23 characters for several reasons:
- It’s much better for everyone’s privacy that links people post remain in their original form. Link shortener services tend to track the people that click on them, sometimes inserting adverts and potentially censoring links too.
- Avoiding link shorteners means links will continue to work for as long as possible and aren’t dependent on the existence of a link shortener service. (This isn’t a theoretical risk, Google’s link shortener service goo.gl will shut down in September 2025 and all of its links will just return a “404 not found” error.)
- It lets people reading your post more easily see where the link goes before they click on it.
- It means people who frequently link to sites with longer addresses aren’t discriminated against.
What is a “link shortener” service?
A link shortener service is a third party service such as bit.ly where you enter a link and it provides a shorter version that travels via the third party service’s website. This was originally used to post long links within short character limits on sites like Twitter, but it is also often used for tracking what people click on.
But I want to track people who click on my links!
You can use link shorteners to track people, but you probably shouldn’t. Also, some people may wonder why you are using link shorteners when all links count for 23 characters anyway.
Why is it 23 characters?
Apparently Twitter’s original built-in link shortener used 23 characters. So when Mastodon removed the need for shorteners, they emphasised this by only counting 23 characters for all links.
What is wrong with short links?
There’s nothing wrong with short links! The Fedi.Tips website has a very short link indeed (fedi.tips).
But a link shortener service is something totally different, it means a third party service like bit.ly where you can’t actually see the link you’re clicking on. They’re called link shorteners because originally they were used to post long links on services with very small character limits such as Twitter.
Is a link shortener where it strips away the tracking extensions of a link?
No. A link shortening service is where it replaces the actual link with its own link, then forwards clicks on that third party link. It is fine to strip away tracking extensions, that is nothing to do with link shortener services.
Link shortener services usually include the tracking extensions of long links anyway, and add their own too.
Is it okay to manually remove the tracking ID extensions from a long link?
Yes, that’s 100% fine. It is fine to manually shorten links by removing tracking ID stuff.