Several of the major social media platforms - Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter - have effectively declared war on linking to things and I absolutely hate it
"Link in my bio" / "Link in thread" / "Link in first comment"... or increasingly no link at all, just an unsourced screenshot of a page
:blobfoxsigngenau: @simon, @mhoye und @anildash, link censorship is so pervasive inside walled gardens it also breed out another symptom that’s carried back to free networks: screenshots of article (often headline) and social media posts.
@JeffGrigg Wow! Could you say more about those "no links allowed" policies? (Or even link to one?) Is that a setting they enable on the platform or a human-enforced moderation rule? If the latter, do they ever defend it with a principle or reason?
A couple of things there Simon. How do you know this? Are you still using the deprecated, privacy mining, monolithic silos to which you refer, or are you just taking this on the word of good, 3rd party information sources?
If it's the former, why?
If it's the latter, then yippie kai yay! The demise of these platforms is underway and in full swing - just as Steve Ballmer once called Linux "Cancer", the fact that these silos aren't simply ignoring links to particular resources, especially those in the #Fediverse, and have taken up with the practice of actively blocking them, is a good thing; and you, as a #Fedizen, should be proud.
Yet again, if it is the former, and you really insist on validating and monetizing those privacy mining silos via your subjugation as inventoried chattel there, consider pinning something akin to the following to the top of your profile (make sure to read the alt-text for the image):
@mhoye@simon@anildash I think today there's still a place for "link in bio" type sites, especially when you might have, say, more than 4 links (i.e., mastodon) or more than the one which most social media allows.
I'm actually thinking that's what I'll make thisismissem.social be eventually.
@thisismissem@mhoye@anildash those are fine - if anything they're healthy, I like that people are encouraged to tie their various online presences together in a single place
What I hate is when people stop linking to and sharing individual articles because they are encouraged not to do that
@simon@mhoye@anildash yeah, that's fair. I think that's also due to accounts being regularly suspended due to the contents at the link (i.e., it's very common that posting an onlyfans URL in an instagram story will result in your account being suspended)
And the reason I mention something adult here, is because they're often leaders with how these link in bio services are used. e.g., Tumblr blocks all links to allmylinks.com, but you can use a custom domain to make it work.
@simon there’s also the “WARNING: this is a link to the outside of our walled garden, and could cause irreparable damage, for which we cannot be responsible” pop up approach.
It’s an older dark pattern, sir, but it checks out.
I am particularly irked by 1. the tendency to hijack links by replacing every URL with a minified/obscure redirect, thus further attacking the 'readability' of the web and 2. the fact that some of them are believed to maintain lists of URLs that will 'shadowban' the post or the user if posted.
@simon my proposal to work around any linking limitations is to "just" define and maintain our own linking layer on top of all forms of social media -- in particular, using [[wikilinks]] to signal that the user means to link to an external knowledge base ;)
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