you’re right that this is likely to be used for tracking crap, but i wouldn’t write off the concept as only for that
for example, home assistant has https://my.home-assistant.io/ where you can set your home assistant URL and doc links (etc) link there, and then that site in turn automatically redirects to the correct place on your local home assistant
this could be used similarly by the fediverse: imagine my.join-lemmy.org where lemmy instances you’re not logged into redirected you to, which then in turn redirects to your home instance… that way, links across the web to lemmy would automatically redirect to your home instance
perhaps it’s not something that’s worth the trade off - centralising in some ways - but in federated platforms on the web it’s far from a write-off
you’re right that this is likely to be used for tracking crap, but i wouldn’t write off the concept as only for that
for example, home assistant has https://my.home-assistant.io/ where you can set your home assistant URL and doc links (etc) link there, and then that site in turn automatically redirects to the correct place on your local home assistant
this could be used similarly by the fediverse: imagine my.join-lemmy.org where lemmy instances you’re not logged into redirected you to, which then in turn redirects to your home instance… that way, links across the web to lemmy would automatically redirect to your home instance
perhaps it’s not something that’s worth the trade off - centralising in some ways - but in federated platforms on the web it’s far from a write-off
They don’t need to redirect to click track. They could very easily do that on the front end and you wouldn’t even know it was being done.
Or we could start using ap:// links https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ef61/fep-ef61.md