wiki/mandatorylinkshortening Mandatory link shortening (link proxy-ing?) For tracking purposes, Twitter forces every link you post through a mandatory link ''shortening'' ''service'' that turns URLs into links where the anchor text is the URL but the href is a different URL. This is basically phishing. If you post a link on Mastodon, it'll turn it into a link respecting the input text (meaning, it doesn't create a phish href) it but does ''ellipsis-truncate'' the anchor.