Mastodawn

In some cases, eg YT vids, you need certain parameters. In particular, when the link starts with youtube dot com /watch, the v parameter says which video. It has to remain after the question mark (?). But you can remove other params and the ampersands (&) that separate them.

YT also allows a t param in seconds to indicate a starting offset. I often add this manually to jump to whatever's interesting.

You can generally play around with removing params to see what's actually needed.

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Tracking params often include "id" (sid, smid, fbclid, etc). You'll also see params starting with utm_ (often from medium, eg). These should all be removed.

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I blocked the flipboard.com domain. Every bot seems to include tracking info on its links. They often show up under the news tag.

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I've had some frustration with flipboard too.
As I recall, many/all of the links to their domain in their posts were a 'road to nowhere'. No article to read. No subsequent link to the article in the post, etc.

It didn't make any sense. IIRC, I replied to one of those posts and asked them WTF?

I actually got a reply. Something along the lines of "It's not supposed to be this way." But my experience never changed.

I blocked their server for a while. But I lost out on some content I wanted. So I went with a filter instead.

Gildilinie Gremlin 🏳️‍⚧️2d ago

@darth_hideout also clearuls plugin for firefox will automatically remove a lot of these tracking parameters automatically, but not in all situations

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/

ClearURLs – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US)

Download ClearURLs for Firefox. Removes tracking elements from URLs

There were some Fedi posts about the "utm" URL parameters going around somewhat recently.

In general, I agree it's sensible to remove them when sharing links.

But...

Sometimes, a link includes "utm_medium=activitypub".

Maybe we shouldn't remove those? I mean, if we want to promote Mastodon & the greater Fediverse, why not leave it intact?

It tells the tracking website where we came from and maybe validates their participation in the Fediverse.

Thoughts?

FWIW, Flipboard is one of the few I've seen that tracks ActivityPub clicks.

(I can't think of any others at the moment...except maybe Ars Technica?)

@DaveMasonDotMe

Two things:

- Mastodon charges a fixed amount (default 23 chars, configurable per instance) for all links. So there's no harm in lengthening a URL by leaving/adding params, fragment, etc.

- The utm params are probably less invasive than the "id" ones, which may encode who shared the link or more detailed (& opaque) info.

That's a great reminder: I've really enjoyed the way Mastodon handles links...and not penalizing us for all those obnoxiously long URLs.

opulentpaving 2d ago

I'm always shocked at how many people don't know this. People send me links with the tracking UTM still in it all the time.