Marketers: It's time to retire your link shortener

It's funny how some products and even entire markets arise specifically to address problems and shortcomings in other products. Adblockers arose because browsing the web was becoming a bloated and painful experience, and web browsers didn't have any way to address the problem. Grammarly launched to fill a gap in word processing. Venmo launched because banks didn't offer a way for individuals to quickly pay other people.

Link shorteners, if you go back to their invention, arose to solve a very specific issue. Twitter was becoming massively popular in the late 2000s, but had a 140-character limit to messages (which was a design decision made when a significant part of its user base got messages through texts on their phone). So for people who wanted to share a web link in a tweet, every character counted. Tools like bit.ly and Buffer's version, buff.ly, among others, saved precious characters in the original message.

The social media character length landscape in 2023

Fast forward to 2023, and the landscape looks a lot different. Twitter's character limit is 280 now, with paid subscribers having the option to send messages with thousands of characters. Other platforms have no such limits; LinkedIn and Facebook have character limits well into the thousands, and new market entrants like Threads (500), and Blue Sky(300) have a slightly larger limits. There's no longer a good reason to default to a link shortener, and link shorteners have always come with other risks that we've just ignored over the years:

1. Control by Unstable Governments: Many popular link shortening URLs, such as bit.ly and buff.ly, use the .ly top-level domain (TLD), which is assigned to Libya. This places control of a widely used marketing tool in the hands of a government that has not always been stable. The potential risks and uncertainties this presents shouldn't be overlooked, even though we have done so for years.
2. Obscuring the Destination: Link shorteners obscure the destination of the link, making it difficult for users to know where they are being directed. This has made link shorteners a vector for potential cybercrime and abuse. Phishing attacks, malware distribution, and other malicious activities can be facilitated through shortened links, posing a significant risk to both brands and consumers.

It's time to retire your link shortener

While there's still a reason to have a central place to track all of the links you use to share externally, there's no longer a compelling reason to outsource that to a third party. There are several open source link shorteners available - this list taken from the source code hosting platform Github lists the most popular:

• kutt.it - Both be a managed service, and self-hosted option, due to being open source on GitHub
• lstu.fr - Another open source link shortener that provides an official instance at the same time
• Polr - a quick, modern, and open-source link shortener. It allows you to host your own URL shortener, to brand your URLs, and to gain control over your data.
• yourls
• shlink
• pygmy - An open-source, feature rich & extensible url-shortener + analytics written in Python.
• dub.sh - A open-source link management tool for modern marketing teams to create, share, and track short links.
• Eastlake - A short url system based on cloudflare worker.

If you're thinking about dropping your link shortener and want to get some advice on how to proceed, contact us at Orchestra. This isn't a service we provide (yet?) but we're happy to help you select an alternative, free of charge.