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There is a really good privacy feature on Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse:
When you post a link on Mastodon etc, it remains exactly as you posted it. There is no analytics or tracking going on, no one is monitoring clicks on links.
By contrast, on Twitter/X and Bluesky the links people post are redirected so clicks can be monitored. We don't know exactly what Musk or Bluesky do with this info, but they do it by redirecting all links to sites they control (t.co & go.bsky.app).
@FediTips I’d always assumed it protected the user from having their profile or group leaked to websites they visit (which is good IMO for privacy if there’s not another way to achieve that). Hadn’t considered Facebook using it for tracking and did not look into getting more website-related metrics from them.
The most blatant tracking, of course, is when social media sites try to map your network of contacts with share IDs tacked onto URLs (or just unique URLs) you share.
Clicking on a direct link doesn't show your profile to websites? I've not heard that before?
Whatever info leaks to a website, it's the same whether you click directly or via a redirect. The redirect just leaks additional info to whoever controls the redirect site.
@FediTips I didn’t mean that direct links don’t show your profile to websites, of course that would happen if following a link from someone’s profile (at least on the web).
Looking at Google analytics for Facebook referrals in the past, I only saw a redirect URL as the referrer, not the URL of anyone’s profile (same with Twitter). Facebook offered a more private experience by default, so it seemed to make sense to me that way. But it’s quite obvious now that they have nefarious uses for that data with tendrils that spread across the web to collect an entire profile about you.
Ahhh gotcha, now I understand what you mean 
Thanks!