 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 42 comments
 @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. Via @mhoye here's a foresightful piece about this by @anildash in 2019 https://www.anildash.com//2019/12/10/link-in-bio-is-how-they-tried-to-kill-the-web/ @simon What I love the most is the "no link at all, like actually really none" variant. Happens a lot when venues sync their social media posts from Instagram to Facebook, but forget there's no link in bio on Facebook. 😭
@simon it's especially frustrating now to see so many well meaning creators who actually have their own websites but still use Linktree, et.al as their profile url because "Link in bio" restrictions have made it so prevalent. @daniel thank you, you just made that click for me! I had been baffled as to why the market for tools like Linktree even existed... obviously it's because of "link in bio"!   @eb @simon @daniel no, the issue is that since you basically only have room for *one* link in your bio, you need it to point to some kind of hub where you can add and remove links on demand easily. Building your own is not hard but it’s not *zero* effort. (And some sites, like onlyfans, are penalized harshly, which some creators obviously do not like) @eb @simon @daniel there are potentially lots of reasons. A linktree is just a list of strings and hyperlinks on a webpage, but then, so is a fediverse profile really, and we don’t all self-host those. The presence of features around its purpose make it easier to work with than a custom page on a custom site, well worth the $5 to save a couple hours of maintenance a year for someone doing this professionally   The experience for an end user is pretty good. If you have used one, you are immediately familiar with the format. It feels like you are presenting the visitor with a menu of options. The creator can schedule when links show up and control the order to work well for new books, songs, products, etc. (2/3) I built my own Linktree clone (poorly, but it works) a few years ago and debated helping people host their own, but the few people I spoke with were largely happy with Linktree enough not to see why to use something more of a hassle to host themselves. 🤷  @offby1 I’d love to buy a week or two of a designer’s time to build something that scales better design-wise. I have multiple dozens of GitHub Pages hosted projects, which work well, but that’s less than an idea for the average person. I thought about a SaaS app that lets someone bring their S3, Cloudflare, or whatever bucket but that’s also really technical for them. @webology You've nailed it; one of the biggest gaps in the “self-host it!" Philosophy is the massive hidden technical skill set required to do so well and safely. Self-hosting is _a_ solution, but it's out of reach of a lot of people. Worse, if you try to offer a platform (any *aaS variation) you may find yourself coerced into becoming the next tool of deplatforming when CC processors cut you off for supporting sex work. (in conclusion, the real problem is the prudery of Visa and Mastercard :) @webology Great ! I've been looking for something like this, I'll have a closer look   @simon IMHO, it all started with <a href="..." nofollow> to improve your own site ranking by not giving credit to others. What these companies are now doing is only an extension of that at scale. Yet another example of shitting in the well as @pluralistic calls it, I guess:  @prem_k @simon @pluralistic no follow was certainly abused, but it came from a very real problem. Pagerank gave you a higher score if more sites linked to yours, particularly if they linked with the search word in the text of the link. So how do you get your site to the top of the front page of Google? You have bots that spam every site with a comment system with links to your site. Slashdot was full of this kind of thing, as were most Wordpress blogs. Adding nofollow removed the incentive. @david_chisnall I agree. I've now updated my post above to include the word "misused" ... Which is what I'm pointing at, not the original intent ... @simon @pluralistic I think it's significant - to myself at least - that the sites you mention are all sites I refuse to engage in for other reasons. Restrictions on my speech - of which "no external links" are an excellent example - sit poorly with me. I might use one on a very rare occasion - but my inclination is to find communities that are more open.   @simon it's supposedly baked into communities on Instagram , I had a handstand workshop in NYC and wanted to link to my mastodon page but my friend said no one will even click on the external link for .. reasons ? Seems crazy to me..  @simon me too, let's revolt? :) 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 ;)  It's like an 11th commandment: "I am your social media platform, you shall not have any other social media platform before me." Information bubbles & social isolation - doesn't every profitable religion start this way?  @simon Email too. The more links in your email the more likely they are to put it in a spam folder. |
Gregory's Server
@simon https://www.anildash.com/2019/12/10/link-in-bio-is-how-they-tried-to-kill-the-web/
@anildash called this in the air years ago.