19 ms·

Show HN: I made an open-source Bitly alternative

255 points by steventey 4y ago

medv 4y ago
Here’s mine: https://ï.at https://xn--gda.at
- medv 4y ago
  Apparently HN replaces ï.at to xn-
  - briandoesdev 4y ago
    Didn't think they'd handle punycode like that.
  - dicknuckle 4y ago
    xn-- for me
- steventey 4y ago
  Funny thing – I actually had to do some regex validation for domain submissions from users and this was one of the edge cases I had to account for haha Here's the regex that I ended up with: https://github.com/steven-tey/dub/blob/main/lib/utils.ts#L124-L126 https://github.com/steven-tey/dub/blob/main/lib/utils.ts#L12...
waynesonfire 4y ago
in rust?
agucova 4y ago
I literally spent all day Tuesday trying to find a decent alternative to bit.ly. I'm so glad this exists.
- bluelightning2k 4y ago
  If you're spending a day why not just roll your own?
  - joshmanders 4y ago
    Because it takes longer than a day to build?
    - intelVISA 4y ago
      Only if you take a 12hr lunch (can happen)
- agentdrtran 4y ago
  Have you looked at Kutt?
- steventey 4y ago
  So glad to hear that!!
- srhngpr 4y ago
  I have been using https://github.com/YOURLS/YOURLS https://github.com/YOURLS/YOURLS for years without any issues
mnemnc 4y ago
This looks nice! I recently deployed my own Rallly instance (Doodle alternative) via docker-compose and would love to give dub.sh a try. Any plans for releasing a docker version?
- steventey 4y ago
  No plans yet, but you can easily clone this repo and deploy your own version on platforms like Vercel.com, no docker containers required! :)
Rafsark 4y ago
Is there a special thing to prevent being blocked from most platforms? For instance, if I post your shortlink on HackerNews, can I be marked as "dupe"
jackson1442 4y ago
Do you have any mechanisms to handle abuse? That's a common problem in the URL shortener space, and usually leads to them getting blocked from most platforms.
- steventey 4y ago
  Yeah I was thinking about that right before launching last night, gonna go ahead and add some simple abuse prevention measures now! My first idea is blacklisting certain problematic hostnames and not let folks add them. Can you think of any other abuse vectors?
  - TonyTrapp 4y ago
    > Can you think of any other abuse vectors? Just be prepared that your service will be (ab)used for linking to malware, pirated content, porn.
robin_reala 4y ago
I really hate link shorteners, because they inevitably die and leave a spray of broken links over the web. What’s wrong with normal URLs?
- bluetidepro 4y ago
  >What’s wrong with normal URLs? Length (in many contexts). Agree or disagree, but that answers your question for the "why" from what I have seen in my experience. Marketing wants to link to something sexy like "te.st/dog" vs "news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32939407". Many sites may have longer url structures (esp nested structures) for various reasons that are not easy to remember or sexy to have on an ad, so when it's short it's easy to remember, and simple to type out for the user.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    it's not really about it being sexy, it's about it being able to be typed in manually on a mobile keyboard by humans. the url editing experience on mobile browsers is terrible. like trying to write an essay through a keyhole.
    - bluetidepro 4y ago
      That too, yup!
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    Tim Berners-Lee invented hyperlinks so that URLs can be shortened to a single word, character or even image while keeping them visible to the user if need to by hovering over it. People using these kind of links shorterner are people using bad tools and bad UIs. This is that usage that needs to be corrected, and not by inventing things even more stupid.
    - InitialBP 4y ago
      You can't put a hyperlink on a magazine, the tv, or the radio. There are definitely reasonable applications of shortened URLs that apply outside of the normal day-to-day web browsing and applications.
pluc 4y ago
I remember the short url craze - bitly alternatives were everywhere (even @ the G[1]!) and creating one was basically the Hello World of programming for a time. Real shame how it went from convenience tool (and largely coupled with microblogging character limit) to aggressive corporate tracking (though bitly was always a champion of the latter) https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/03/transitioning-google-url-shortener.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/03/transitioning-goog...
bluetidepro 4y ago
FYI you have some rogue script or something on the page that brings my pretty hefty windows 10 pc to a halt. It spikes my CPU to 100% and the page is in like 1FPS. I think it's your countdown thing for pricing. Something is def up with it, you may want to disable that temp.
- adoxyz 4y ago
  Same thing here. After scrolling about halfway through the page, fans went off and the whole site came to a crawl. Could also be the globe animation.
  - steventey 4y ago
    Ahh yes I believe it's the globe animation, it uses a very simple stripped down version of webgl & threejs (based on the lib: https://cobe.vercel.app/ https://cobe.vercel.app/) Gonna think about how I can optimize that further! Thanks for the headsup y'all!
    - redweer 4y ago
      you could render a mp4 or webm video, it wouldn't be as fancy but would just work
- ct0 4y ago
  Slows down my pretty basic laptop as well.
  - whalesalad 4y ago
    Have you tried this? https://www.downloadmoreram.com/ https://www.downloadmoreram.com/
    - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
      You know, if you put your paging file into your Google Drive, Dropbox, etc., you're effectively downloading more RAM.
indonxmalon 4y ago
memorable 4y ago
A bit of a shameless plug, but I also created an open-source link shortener, using Python and Flask. Although not as polished and full-fledged as this one, it done its job pretty well, with basic click statistics and custom key URLs. https://github.com/HoangTuan110/flyurl https://github.com/HoangTuan110/flyurl
HeckFeck 4y ago
The grandfather of all link shorteners: https://shorturl.com/ https://shorturl.com/ I had a .vze.com subdomain registered there in approx. 2006 and it still is live. Unfortunately, the target domain and website is long gone.
memorable 4y ago
The site looks quite laggy on my phone, and moving around feels janky. Could it be the Javascript that caused this?
- steventey 4y ago
  Hey! I believe it's the globe animation, it uses a very simple stripped down version of webgl & threejs (based on the lib: https://cobe.vercel.app/ https://cobe.vercel.app/) Gonna think about how I can optimize that further! Thanks for the headsup!
  - Dolios 4y ago
    FYI, I'm on an absolute beast of a machine and my browser locked up while trying to view that page. When I mean beast, I mean beast.
    - steventey 4y ago
      Oh nooo :( what's the specs of your computer? I'm gonna try and optimize this further tonight!
      - intelVISA 4y ago
        Specs: beast
        steventey 4y ago
        hahahaha
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    I think you should get rid of that stuff. I was compiling some el scripts in the background and surfing around just fine and got to your page and it starting taking a couple of seconds to respond to mouse clicks until closing the page, same for both Brave and Firefox (most recent versions on both) on windows 10. I'd give benefit of a doubt since you're doing a new service but most people wouldn't come back if that happened to their machine.
memorable 4y ago
Some necessary questions: - Does this use any blacklist to prevent URL shortener looping (i.e. using multiple URL shorteners on top of each other to bypass the checking), or preventing any potentially malicious sites? - Does this have rate limits? URL shorteners get abused quite regularly, so this should be necessary.
- steventey 4y ago
  Very good questions! I was actually thinking about that right before launching last night! I'm planning to blacklist certain problematic hostnames and not let folks add them. In terms of rate limits, it does have rate limits when it comes to collecting analytics (if you spam click a link >10 times in 10s it still redirects you but it stops recording clicks. I can't think of how URL looping could bypass checking – could you elaborate?
  - LinuxBender 4y ago
    Assuming validation of their licensing one might be able to use the same .txt lists that the browser addon uBlock imports as a baseline, then have a way to add custom entries. To keep Google and Bing happy maybe check to see if they have an official list of bad domains as well.
overshard 4y ago
Good luck on your link shortener project! I made an open source link shortener many years ago and eventually threw in the towel and quit. The problem domain for link shorteners is one of anti-spam and abuse. Charging for it makes complete sense to try and weed this out but having any amount of "free" I found to be a hotbed of reports thrown against my hosting provider and registrar for supporting spam. I found myself getting quickly blacklisted everywhere since spammers love to use new shorteners for bypassing their own blacklists. I've not looked into the problem again in 10+ years since. If I did I would 100% skip the free plan.
foxbee 4y ago
Great website. I really like the globe and overall theme - reminds me of Vercel. One small note - the github stars image made me think you had 0 stars. Not a big deal, but you might want to update it. Great work
- foxbee 4y ago
  The UI of the product is nice too - really feels like Vercel which is a good thing. It would be good if you were able to build UTM tags in the product, and pull analytics on them - apologies if this already possible.
  - steventey 4y ago
    That's exactly the next thing on my roadmap! Thanks for the suggestion!
- steventey 4y ago
  Oh my word! Good catch lol I'm not sure how that broke, will fix now! And thanks a lot for the kind words!
gnicholas 4y ago
I tried using a bitly alternative but found that when I sent them to users via email the links were flagged by gmail as being dangerous. There were no problems when I sent bitly links, or the plain links. I'm hesitant to try another alternative because I wouldn't want to get set up in a new system, only to have these problems crop up again.
- steventey 4y ago
  Very good point, I'm going to try and add some abuse prevention measures to make sure the domain doesn't get blacklisted! In the meantime, you can also use your own custom domain for maximum control: https://twitter.com/steventey/status/1572958205814214657 https://twitter.com/steventey/status/1572958205814214657
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  I assume thats because bitly has excellent blocking for known malware sites and techniques (rate limiting/etc) since they've been around for so long.
jonas-w 4y ago
Genuine question. Why would people pay for the pro version if they could just host it for themselves? Does the pro version have some proprietary stuff which would have advantages to the selfhosted version?
- vinaypai 4y ago
  I can easily envision a non-technical person spending a few bucks for this because they don't know how to set things up without help. I don't see that working at $99/month though. It's WAY more than most bit.ly plans for a vastly more limited product.
  - steventey 4y ago
    That's a great point, thanks for mentioning that! I'm gonna do some pricing research over the next couple of months to see what the optimal pricing is for a tool like this! :)
- dspillett 4y ago
  The usual use case for paying for something you could self-host, is that you don't have to self-host and therefore manage it. Someone else deals with installation, updates, and ongoing availability. For something like this there is perhaps extra factors like someone else worrying about abuse by malicious users and the resulting risk of being black-listed by spam filters.
- sosborn 4y ago
  At my work, getting approval to pay for this would take about 5 minutes. On the other hand, if I had to provision a server to self-host, I might be lucky to have this done in the next six weeks, depending on how IT is feeling when I ask.
  - throitallaway 4y ago
    Here we'd also have to go though a vendor review (security, legal, etc.)
kls0e 4y ago
How does this compare to YOURLS [0]? btw, I like link shorteners for their millenial quirkiness. kickme.to/the2000s [0] https://yourls.org/ https://yourls.org/
dijit 4y ago
Heh, I did the opposite recently after reading "Software Engineering at Google" and I discovered that even though it would be very easy to make: there is no equivalent to the `go/` permanent "friendly" URL shortener. It can be backed by a TOML file for hardcoding URLS or a database for making it easy to add new ones (which I think is the Google way). If I did a stupid; or a better version already exists: let me know. https://git.drk.sc/dijit/redirector-rs https://git.drk.sc/dijit/redirector-rs https://github.com/dijit/redirector-rs https://github.com/dijit/redirector-rs
- steventey 4y ago
  True! But a link shortener SaaS is more than just redirects – it also needs data visualization to help marketing teams understand the performance of their links, which is half of the value prop imho! That being said, absolutely love your spin on the go/ links – I learned about it from my friend who works at GitHub and it's kinda blown my mind ever since :)
jedberg 4y ago
I'm not sure how being open source helps here. How do we know the code that is running on the service is the same as the open source code?
- rabuse 4y ago
  I mean, you could say that about any open source service. The best way to see if it works like the service, is to just compile it and run it yourself...
  - steventey 4y ago
    It's basically an effort to promote code transparency + user privacy, and in general it's just super fun building in public! :)
miked85 4y ago
The last thing the Internet needs is more link shorteners.
TimLeland 4y ago
I'm the creator of https://T.LY https://T.LY URL Shortener and am always interested when I see new short link services. My biggest piece of advice is to figure out a way to detect malicious URLs before your service is completely shut down. A month after starting T.LY, my servers were disabled by my hosting company without warning. Since then, I've worked on systems and tools to prevent malicious short links and make the service more reliable. Most comments I see here are questioning why we still need URL shorteners. Print, media, SMS, and analytics are just a few reasons. I wrote some additional info on my blog: https://timleland.com/are-url-shorteners-useful-today/ https://timleland.com/are-url-shorteners-useful-today/ Another interesting thought is when you create a TinyURL, it's 20 characters long, and Bitly links are 14 characters long. These services cannot create short links anymore. As a URL shortener grows, the number of actual short links diminishes. Currently, T.LY has over 10 million short links, which means plenty of four and five-character short URLs are available. Two character URLs 3,844 (62^2) unique combinations Three character URLs 238,328 (62^3) unique combinations Four character URLs 14,776,336 (62^4) unique combinations Five character URLs 916,132,832 (62^5) unique combinations Six character URLs 56,800,235,584 (62^6) unique combinations Seven character URLs 3,521,614,606,208 (62^7) unique combinations Eight character URLs 218,340,105,584,896 (62^8) unique combinations
- lioeters 4y ago
  Just curious, can a short link be a single emoji as the URL (after domain)? If so, does it technically take up 4 characters? And (if you don't mind answering) how much does such a short domain like t.ly cost?
  - jraph 4y ago
    It is possible, but your users will need to type emojis (which can be hard or impossible on some devices), or you'll need to urlencode it in href attributes and it will actually take encodeURIComponent("").length = 12 characters (imagine a simple emoji between the quotes). It will also require bigger QRCodes than alphanumeric characters. It might display incorrectly in address bars.
    - 4y ago
slang800 4y ago
You should add a way to export all the URLs on the platform in a format that matches the URLTeam (https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam) releases. That way, when you shut down your service, we can figure out what some of these short links went to.
- lioeters 4y ago
  > when you shut down That's a reasonable assumption, since the service is not likely to be sustainable financially.
  - klelatti 4y ago
    Why shouldn't it be sustainable? Seems like the sort of service where a freemium AGPL open source model might work quite well.
    - steventey 4y ago
      Agreed – the plan is to keep this running as long as possible, and the freemium AGPL model is a great way to get there in a sustainable pace! :)
      - lioeters 4y ago
        Sorry for the pessimistic quip. I love that it's open source, the site design is beautiful, and the service looks well made. Good luck!
        steventey 4y ago
        Appreciate the kind words! :)
        klelatti 4y ago
        Best of luck!
anderspitman 4y ago
Note that for many use cases, you can host your own URL shortener for free on GitHub pages (or Netlify, etc) by creating static index.html pages containing HTML redirects[0]. If you buy your own short domain, you can even port it between different providers if necessary. [0]: https://apitman.com/18/#html-redirects https://apitman.com/18/#html-redirects
jeffreygoesto 4y ago
I read "Billy alternative" and waited for some cool Ikea hack. Bummer.
- steventey 4y ago
  lol that would've been amazing haha
trevcanhuman 4y ago
Nice project, although I'd definitely not use it. The website seems too bloated and as others have said uses too much ram. For personal use I just curl one of these URLs from my linux machine: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications#Pastebin_services https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications#Pasteb...
- steventey 4y ago
  Apologies for the performance issues! I just merged a PR that should mitigate this: https://github.com/steven-tey/dub/pull/13 https://github.com/steven-tey/dub/pull/13 Can you check again and let me know if the performance issue is still bad?
jiffygist 4y ago
Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information). I'm using Bromite on Android
aliljet 4y ago
I ran a variation of something like this myself for years. Eventually, the site was routinely being used for spam-style (e.g., a link to some illegal data, or some advertisement to embed somewhere, etc.) links. And when I took the site down, my users asked me for help to transition away from this service that they were uniquely relying on. It was a mess. See goo.gl. I wonder how you prevent your service from being used inappropriately and how you handle the eventual costs
- steventey 4y ago
  Very good point re: goo.gl My plan here is to lean into the custom domains & self-hosted aspect – where enterprises and businesses would be able to get set up with a custom domain link shortener super easily. Individual short links are definitely not sustainable in the long run, I might set a rule where randomly-generated links > 30 days get deleted, to save it you'll either need to make an account (to prevent spam) or set up your own domain.
KronisLV 4y ago
Looks like a visually pleasant site to browse, however it appears that there is some lag on Firefox (on the desktop), at least for me. As far as link shorteners go, I actually host my own containerized instance of YOURLS: https://yourls.org/ https://yourls.org/ It's fairly boring and not really pretty, but it seems to work okay for me. Actually, as far as self-hosting goes, there's quite a few options out there: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#url-shorteners https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#url... Of course, one can also find some free services hosted by others.
- kerv 4y ago
  > however it appears that there is some lag on Firefox (on the desktop) I also had noticeable lag using Chrome (on desktop)
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    firefox and brave both choked on it for me (while a bunch of el scripts are building in the background). that page killed my GUI responsiveness lol which was unencumbered before I went there (aka windows was doing fine with compiling in the background and letting me browse the web)
- steventey 4y ago
  Thanks for the headsup re: the lag – there's some performance issues with the Globe animation that I'm trying to fix right now, sorry about that!
  - sccxy 4y ago
    Just remove it. Your site is good without the globe. Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).
    - steventey 4y ago
      Just merged a PR that should mitigate this: https://github.com/steven-tey/dub/pull/13 https://github.com/steven-tey/dub/pull/13 Can y'all check again and let me know if the performance issue is still bad? Feel free to reply here or send me an email at steven[at]dub.sh
jawadch93 4y ago
[dead]
statico 4y ago
I did something similar with https://statico.link https://statico.link when I couldn't find a cheap, free and easy service to do this. It started as a simple nginx URL map since I was already running nginx (https://gist.github.com/statico/14fa84d7e79722031d5e49694191ba1d https://gist.github.com/statico/14fa84d7e79722031d5e49694191...) but is now a tiny containerized app because friends requested an index page. The requirement is that all links need to be named (i.e. no random hashes).
xmonkee 4y ago
Can I ask what you used to make that landing page? I've seen a lot of pages use that template lately and it's killing me not knowing
- steventey 4y ago
  It's not a template but it uses Tailwind (tailwindcss.com)! Here's the full list of design inspirations for the site: https://twitter.com/steventey/status/1572958213250629633 https://twitter.com/steventey/status/1572958213250629633
Komodai 4y ago
Your site is completely killing my browser.
orangepurple 4y ago
Reminder that there are also great tools designed to do the opposite. https://aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com/ https://aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa... google.com becomes https://aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com/aàÃaAæâÄæäÁÃÅæâÀÁÁÆÂÁAâÂÂàÄàâáÄÃáÆÁàaÆÃàåáâÄÄÃâãåâæáÀÂÅAÂãaåäãääÅÅAäÆÄaåæÆãaÂæÅÀàãÅÆÂÅÁæÅAàÄÁÃÄäÂÃáàÃÀaAÃAåæÅãâÂÅÃÅÄÂæÆÅÃÀäáâÃÁäÆÃÂÅÃâÄÁÀåæäãÆääâAàaåAÃæâÅäÁÄÆÃAÆáÃÂ?åAæãæãæaæââÁáÆáÆåæåÆåÆåæåÃåäáÅåâåÆåÄ https://aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa... shadyurl.com was fun while it lasted. Tagline: Don’t just shorten your Shady URL, make it suspicious and frightening.
- steventey 4y ago
  Love these lol, really gave me a good laugh when I saw them in the past
- password4321 4y ago
  Another chance to warn about: Shorten URLs using invisible spaces https://github.com/zws-im/zws https://github.com/zws-im/zws
  - steventey 4y ago
    Whoa, had no idea this was possible. Pretty cool!
shawnrmclean 4y ago
What happens on the free plan and the 1001'th person clicks the link?
- steventey 4y ago
  The link still works, and the link still gets tracked in redis, you just won't be able to see the stats for the link until you upgrade. It's a similar model to Plausible.io, which I think is really fair! Let me know what you think! :)
midspectrum 4y ago
earlier there was an option to add "+" at the end of any bit.ly link and you can see the stats of any shortened URL. Is that something you've given a thought?
- steventey 4y ago
  Oh interesting! You can actually do that right now with https://dub.sh/stats/<YOUR_SHORTLINK_SLUG> https://dub.sh/stats/<YOUR_SHORTLINK_SLUG> E.g. https://dub.sh/stats/github https://dub.sh/stats/github But I like this idea, might just add it to Dub... ;)
FlashBlaze 4y ago
Still need to fix some bugs, but I made an URL expander using Preact and Cloudflare Workers: https://expand.flashblaze.xyz/ https://expand.flashblaze.xyz/
jensenbox 4y ago
Redis as a primary database gives me chills.
bawolff 4y ago
Not to be negative, but aren't there like a billion open source url shorteners at this point?
workingpatrick 4y ago
nice try nsa
somishere 4y ago
I built a very, very basic one of these a month ago to shorten a couple of unruly domains I had. Supports static and dynamic endpoints that you define. https://thesom.au/gh/shorturl https://thesom.au/gh/shorturl Intended to self host for free/minimal cost on CloudFlare, thus comes with built in analytics, BYO domain, etc.
- steventey 4y ago
  Love this, thanks for sharing!! Did you get to building out the analytics dashboard? Would love to check it out! :D
  - somishere 4y ago
    No dashboard, or web interface even - the idea is that you just use CF's worker analytics for usage stats. There's no storage / db sitting behind it, just a single file to deploy as a worker. Logical next step would be to hook it into KV and include a basic auth/admin API for editing routes and retrieving stats. But even that would add a bucket load of complexity to what is essentially 20-30 lines of obtuse logic currently. Definitely no plans to deploy as a service with custom domains and enterprise offerings :)
nipperkinfeet 4y ago
Is your website cryptojacking? It blew up my GPU.
- steventey 4y ago
  It was because of the globe animation, which is a stripped down version of Three.js + webGL. I just merged a PR that should mitigate this: https://github.com/steven-tey/dub/pull/13 https://github.com/steven-tey/dub/pull/13 Can you check again and let me know if the performance issue is still bad?
zicxor 4y ago
Very laggy - i am getting 10 FPS in your website. You should consider optimizing. Good project, congrats!
fabform 4y ago
iamthejuan 4y ago
I had an account before in Bitly, the username is "username", one day, they just deleted my account for no reason. I never used their service again.
vixalien 4y ago
the globe on the homepage needs some lube. scrolling it on mobile takes some while

255 points by steventey 4y ago

medv 4y ago

Here’s mine: https://ï.at https://xn--gda.at

medv 4y ago
Apparently HN replaces ï.at to xn-
- briandoesdev 4y ago
  Didn't think they'd handle punycode like that.
- dicknuckle 4y ago
  xn-- for me
steventey 4y ago
Funny thing – I actually had to do some regex validation for domain submissions from users and this was one of the edge cases I had to account for haha Here's the regex that I ended up with: https://github.com/steven-tey/dub/blob/main/lib/utils.ts#L124-L126 https://github.com/steven-tey/dub/blob/main/lib/utils.ts#L12...

waynesonfire 4y ago

in rust?

agucova 4y ago

I literally spent all day Tuesday trying to find a decent alternative to bit.ly. I'm so glad this exists.

bluelightning2k 4y ago
If you're spending a day why not just roll your own?
- joshmanders 4y ago
  Because it takes longer than a day to build?
  - intelVISA 4y ago
    Only if you take a 12hr lunch (can happen)
agentdrtran 4y ago
Have you looked at Kutt?
steventey 4y ago
So glad to hear that!!
srhngpr 4y ago
I have been using https://github.com/YOURLS/YOURLS https://github.com/YOURLS/YOURLS for years without any issues

mnemnc 4y ago

This looks nice! I recently deployed my own Rallly instance (Doodle alternative) via docker-compose and would love to give dub.sh a try. Any plans for releasing a docker version?

steventey 4y ago
No plans yet, but you can easily clone this repo and deploy your own version on platforms like Vercel.com, no docker containers required! :)

Rafsark 4y ago

Is there a special thing to prevent being blocked from most platforms? For instance, if I post your shortlink on HackerNews, can I be marked as "dupe"

jackson1442 4y ago

Do you have any mechanisms to handle abuse? That's a common problem in the URL shortener space, and usually leads to them getting blocked from most platforms.

steventey 4y ago
Yeah I was thinking about that right before launching last night, gonna go ahead and add some simple abuse prevention measures now! My first idea is blacklisting certain problematic hostnames and not let folks add them. Can you think of any other abuse vectors?
- TonyTrapp 4y ago
  > Can you think of any other abuse vectors? Just be prepared that your service will be (ab)used for linking to malware, pirated content, porn.

robin_reala 4y ago

I really hate link shorteners, because they inevitably die and leave a spray of broken links over the web. What’s wrong with normal URLs?

bluetidepro 4y ago
>What’s wrong with normal URLs? Length (in many contexts). Agree or disagree, but that answers your question for the "why" from what I have seen in my experience. Marketing wants to link to something sexy like "te.st/dog" vs "news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32939407". Many sites may have longer url structures (esp nested structures) for various reasons that are not easy to remember or sexy to have on an ad, so when it's short it's easy to remember, and simple to type out for the user.
- Spivak 4y ago
  it's not really about it being sexy, it's about it being able to be typed in manually on a mobile keyboard by humans. the url editing experience on mobile browsers is terrible. like trying to write an essay through a keyhole.
  - bluetidepro 4y ago
    That too, yup!
- prmoustache 4y ago
  Tim Berners-Lee invented hyperlinks so that URLs can be shortened to a single word, character or even image while keeping them visible to the user if need to by hovering over it. People using these kind of links shorterner are people using bad tools and bad UIs. This is that usage that needs to be corrected, and not by inventing things even more stupid.
  - InitialBP 4y ago
    You can't put a hyperlink on a magazine, the tv, or the radio. There are definitely reasonable applications of shortened URLs that apply outside of the normal day-to-day web browsing and applications.

pluc 4y ago

I remember the short url craze - bitly alternatives were everywhere (even @ the G[1]!) and creating one was basically the Hello World of programming for a time. Real shame how it went from convenience tool (and largely coupled with microblogging character limit) to aggressive corporate tracking (though bitly was always a champion of the latter) https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/03/transitioning-google-url-shortener.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/03/transitioning-goog...

bluetidepro 4y ago

FYI you have some rogue script or something on the page that brings my pretty hefty windows 10 pc to a halt. It spikes my CPU to 100% and the page is in like 1FPS. I think it's your countdown thing for pricing. Something is def up with it, you may want to disable that temp.

adoxyz 4y ago
Same thing here. After scrolling about halfway through the page, fans went off and the whole site came to a crawl. Could also be the globe animation.
- steventey 4y ago
  Ahh yes I believe it's the globe animation, it uses a very simple stripped down version of webgl & threejs (based on the lib: https://cobe.vercel.app/ https://cobe.vercel.app/) Gonna think about how I can optimize that further! Thanks for the headsup y'all!
  - redweer 4y ago
    you could render a mp4 or webm video, it wouldn't be as fancy but would just work
ct0 4y ago
Slows down my pretty basic laptop as well.
- whalesalad 4y ago
  Have you tried this? https://www.downloadmoreram.com/ https://www.downloadmoreram.com/
  - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
    You know, if you put your paging file into your Google Drive, Dropbox, etc., you're effectively downloading more RAM.

indonxmalon 4y ago

memorable 4y ago

A bit of a shameless plug, but I also created an open-source link shortener, using Python and Flask. Although not as polished and full-fledged as this one, it done its job pretty well, with basic click statistics and custom key URLs. https://github.com/HoangTuan110/flyurl https://github.com/HoangTuan110/flyurl

HeckFeck 4y ago

The grandfather of all link shorteners: https://shorturl.com/ https://shorturl.com/ I had a .vze.com subdomain registered there in approx. 2006 and it still is live. Unfortunately, the target domain and website is long gone.

memorable 4y ago

The site looks quite laggy on my phone, and moving around feels janky. Could it be the Javascript that caused this?

steventey 4y ago
Hey! I believe it's the globe animation, it uses a very simple stripped down version of webgl & threejs (based on the lib: https://cobe.vercel.app/ https://cobe.vercel.app/) Gonna think about how I can optimize that further! Thanks for the headsup!
- Dolios 4y ago
  FYI, I'm on an absolute beast of a machine and my browser locked up while trying to view that page. When I mean beast, I mean beast.
  - steventey 4y ago
    Oh nooo :( what's the specs of your computer? I'm gonna try and optimize this further tonight!
    - intelVISA 4y ago
      Specs: beast
      - steventey 4y ago
        hahahaha
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  I think you should get rid of that stuff. I was compiling some el scripts in the background and surfing around just fine and got to your page and it starting taking a couple of seconds to respond to mouse clicks until closing the page, same for both Brave and Firefox (most recent versions on both) on windows 10. I'd give benefit of a doubt since you're doing a new service but most people wouldn't come back if that happened to their machine.

memorable 4y ago

Some necessary questions: - Does this use any blacklist to prevent URL shortener looping (i.e. using multiple URL shorteners on top of each other to bypass the checking), or preventing any potentially malicious sites? - Does this have rate limits? URL shorteners get abused quite regularly, so this should be necessary.

steventey 4y ago
Very good questions! I was actually thinking about that right before launching last night! I'm planning to blacklist certain problematic hostnames and not let folks add them. In terms of rate limits, it does have rate limits when it comes to collecting analytics (if you spam click a link >10 times in 10s it still redirects you but it stops recording clicks. I can't think of how URL looping could bypass checking – could you elaborate?
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  Assuming validation of their licensing one might be able to use the same .txt lists that the browser addon uBlock imports as a baseline, then have a way to add custom entries. To keep Google and Bing happy maybe check to see if they have an official list of bad domains as well.

overshard 4y ago

Good luck on your link shortener project! I made an open source link shortener many years ago and eventually threw in the towel and quit. The problem domain for link shorteners is one of anti-spam and abuse. Charging for it makes complete sense to try and weed this out but having any amount of "free" I found to be a hotbed of reports thrown against my hosting provider and registrar for supporting spam. I found myself getting quickly blacklisted everywhere since spammers love to use new shorteners for bypassing their own blacklists. I've not looked into the problem again in 10+ years since. If I did I would 100% skip the free plan.

foxbee 4y ago

Great website. I really like the globe and overall theme - reminds me of Vercel. One small note - the github stars image made me think you had 0 stars. Not a big deal, but you might want to update it. Great work

foxbee 4y ago
The UI of the product is nice too - really feels like Vercel which is a good thing. It would be good if you were able to build UTM tags in the product, and pull analytics on them - apologies if this already possible.
- steventey 4y ago
  That's exactly the next thing on my roadmap! Thanks for the suggestion!
steventey 4y ago
Oh my word! Good catch lol I'm not sure how that broke, will fix now! And thanks a lot for the kind words!

gnicholas 4y ago

I tried using a bitly alternative but found that when I sent them to users via email the links were flagged by gmail as being dangerous. There were no problems when I sent bitly links, or the plain links. I'm hesitant to try another alternative because I wouldn't want to get set up in a new system, only to have these problems crop up again.

steventey 4y ago
Very good point, I'm going to try and add some abuse prevention measures to make sure the domain doesn't get blacklisted! In the meantime, you can also use your own custom domain for maximum control: https://twitter.com/steventey/status/1572958205814214657 https://twitter.com/steventey/status/1572958205814214657
stjohnswarts 4y ago
I assume thats because bitly has excellent blocking for known malware sites and techniques (rate limiting/etc) since they've been around for so long.

jonas-w 4y ago

Genuine question. Why would people pay for the pro version if they could just host it for themselves? Does the pro version have some proprietary stuff which would have advantages to the selfhosted version?

vinaypai 4y ago
I can easily envision a non-technical person spending a few bucks for this because they don't know how to set things up without help. I don't see that working at $99/month though. It's WAY more than most bit.ly plans for a vastly more limited product.
- steventey 4y ago
  That's a great point, thanks for mentioning that! I'm gonna do some pricing research over the next couple of months to see what the optimal pricing is for a tool like this! :)
dspillett 4y ago
The usual use case for paying for something you could self-host, is that you don't have to self-host and therefore manage it. Someone else deals with installation, updates, and ongoing availability. For something like this there is perhaps extra factors like someone else worrying about abuse by malicious users and the resulting risk of being black-listed by spam filters.
sosborn 4y ago
At my work, getting approval to pay for this would take about 5 minutes. On the other hand, if I had to provision a server to self-host, I might be lucky to have this done in the next six weeks, depending on how IT is feeling when I ask.
- throitallaway 4y ago
  Here we'd also have to go though a vendor review (security, legal, etc.)

kls0e 4y ago

How does this compare to YOURLS [0]? btw, I like link shorteners for their millenial quirkiness. kickme.to/the2000s [0] https://yourls.org/ https://yourls.org/

dijit 4y ago

Heh, I did the opposite recently after reading "Software Engineering at Google" and I discovered that even though it would be very easy to make: there is no equivalent to the `go/` permanent "friendly" URL shortener. It can be backed by a TOML file for hardcoding URLS or a database for making it easy to add new ones (which I think is the Google way). If I did a stupid; or a better version already exists: let me know. https://git.drk.sc/dijit/redirector-rs https://git.drk.sc/dijit/redirector-rs https://github.com/dijit/redirector-rs https://github.com/dijit/redirector-rs

steventey 4y ago
True! But a link shortener SaaS is more than just redirects – it also needs data visualization to help marketing teams understand the performance of their links, which is half of the value prop imho! That being said, absolutely love your spin on the go/ links – I learned about it from my friend who works at GitHub and it's kinda blown my mind ever since :)

jedberg 4y ago

I'm not sure how being open source helps here. How do we know the code that is running on the service is the same as the open source code?

rabuse 4y ago
I mean, you could say that about any open source service. The best way to see if it works like the service, is to just compile it and run it yourself...
- steventey 4y ago
  It's basically an effort to promote code transparency + user privacy, and in general it's just super fun building in public! :)

miked85 4y ago

The last thing the Internet needs is more link shorteners.

TimLeland 4y ago

I'm the creator of https://T.LY https://T.LY URL Shortener and am always interested when I see new short link services. My biggest piece of advice is to figure out a way to detect malicious URLs before your service is completely shut down. A month after starting T.LY, my servers were disabled by my hosting company without warning. Since then, I've worked on systems and tools to prevent malicious short links and make the service more reliable. Most comments I see here are questioning why we still need URL shorteners. Print, media, SMS, and analytics are just a few reasons. I wrote some additional info on my blog: https://timleland.com/are-url-shorteners-useful-today/ https://timleland.com/are-url-shorteners-useful-today/ Another interesting thought is when you create a TinyURL, it's 20 characters long, and Bitly links are 14 characters long. These services cannot create short links anymore. As a URL shortener grows, the number of actual short links diminishes. Currently, T.LY has over 10 million short links, which means plenty of four and five-character short URLs are available. Two character URLs 3,844 (62^2) unique combinations Three character URLs 238,328 (62^3) unique combinations Four character URLs 14,776,336 (62^4) unique combinations Five character URLs 916,132,832 (62^5) unique combinations Six character URLs 56,800,235,584 (62^6) unique combinations Seven character URLs 3,521,614,606,208 (62^7) unique combinations Eight character URLs 218,340,105,584,896 (62^8) unique combinations

lioeters 4y ago
Just curious, can a short link be a single emoji as the URL (after domain)? If so, does it technically take up 4 characters? And (if you don't mind answering) how much does such a short domain like t.ly cost?
- jraph 4y ago
  It is possible, but your users will need to type emojis (which can be hard or impossible on some devices), or you'll need to urlencode it in href attributes and it will actually take encodeURIComponent("").length = 12 characters (imagine a simple emoji between the quotes). It will also require bigger QRCodes than alphanumeric characters. It might display incorrectly in address bars.
  - 4y ago

slang800 4y ago

You should add a way to export all the URLs on the platform in a format that matches the URLTeam (https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam) releases. That way, when you shut down your service, we can figure out what some of these short links went to.

lioeters 4y ago
> when you shut down That's a reasonable assumption, since the service is not likely to be sustainable financially.
- klelatti 4y ago
  Why shouldn't it be sustainable? Seems like the sort of service where a freemium AGPL open source model might work quite well.
  - steventey 4y ago
    Agreed – the plan is to keep this running as long as possible, and the freemium AGPL model is a great way to get there in a sustainable pace! :)
    - lioeters 4y ago
      Sorry for the pessimistic quip. I love that it's open source, the site design is beautiful, and the service looks well made. Good luck!
      - steventey 4y ago
        Appreciate the kind words! :)
        klelatti 4y ago
        Best of luck!

anderspitman 4y ago

Note that for many use cases, you can host your own URL shortener for free on GitHub pages (or Netlify, etc) by creating static index.html pages containing HTML redirects[0]. If you buy your own short domain, you can even port it between different providers if necessary. [0]: https://apitman.com/18/#html-redirects https://apitman.com/18/#html-redirects

jeffreygoesto 4y ago

I read "Billy alternative" and waited for some cool Ikea hack. Bummer.

steventey 4y ago
lol that would've been amazing haha

trevcanhuman 4y ago

Nice project, although I'd definitely not use it. The website seems too bloated and as others have said uses too much ram. For personal use I just curl one of these URLs from my linux machine: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications#Pastebin_services https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications#Pasteb...

steventey 4y ago
Apologies for the performance issues! I just merged a PR that should mitigate this: https://github.com/steven-tey/dub/pull/13 https://github.com/steven-tey/dub/pull/13 Can you check again and let me know if the performance issue is still bad?

jiffygist 4y ago

Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information). I'm using Bromite on Android

aliljet 4y ago

I ran a variation of something like this myself for years. Eventually, the site was routinely being used for spam-style (e.g., a link to some illegal data, or some advertisement to embed somewhere, etc.) links. And when I took the site down, my users asked me for help to transition away from this service that they were uniquely relying on. It was a mess. See goo.gl. I wonder how you prevent your service from being used inappropriately and how you handle the eventual costs

steventey 4y ago
Very good point re: goo.gl My plan here is to lean into the custom domains & self-hosted aspect – where enterprises and businesses would be able to get set up with a custom domain link shortener super easily. Individual short links are definitely not sustainable in the long run, I might set a rule where randomly-generated links > 30 days get deleted, to save it you'll either need to make an account (to prevent spam) or set up your own domain.

KronisLV 4y ago

Looks like a visually pleasant site to browse, however it appears that there is some lag on Firefox (on the desktop), at least for me. As far as link shorteners go, I actually host my own containerized instance of YOURLS: https://yourls.org/ https://yourls.org/ It's fairly boring and not really pretty, but it seems to work okay for me. Actually, as far as self-hosting goes, there's quite a few options out there: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#url-shorteners https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#url... Of course, one can also find some free services hosted by others.

kerv 4y ago
> however it appears that there is some lag on Firefox (on the desktop) I also had noticeable lag using Chrome (on desktop)
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  firefox and brave both choked on it for me (while a bunch of el scripts are building in the background). that page killed my GUI responsiveness lol which was unencumbered before I went there (aka windows was doing fine with compiling in the background and letting me browse the web)
steventey 4y ago
Thanks for the headsup re: the lag – there's some performance issues with the Globe animation that I'm trying to fix right now, sorry about that!
- sccxy 4y ago
  Just remove it. Your site is good without the globe. Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).
  - steventey 4y ago
    Just merged a PR that should mitigate this: https://github.com/steven-tey/dub/pull/13 https://github.com/steven-tey/dub/pull/13 Can y'all check again and let me know if the performance issue is still bad? Feel free to reply here or send me an email at steven[at]dub.sh

jawadch93 4y ago

[dead]

statico 4y ago

I did something similar with https://statico.link https://statico.link when I couldn't find a cheap, free and easy service to do this. It started as a simple nginx URL map since I was already running nginx (https://gist.github.com/statico/14fa84d7e79722031d5e49694191ba1d https://gist.github.com/statico/14fa84d7e79722031d5e49694191...) but is now a tiny containerized app because friends requested an index page. The requirement is that all links need to be named (i.e. no random hashes).

xmonkee 4y ago

Can I ask what you used to make that landing page? I've seen a lot of pages use that template lately and it's killing me not knowing

steventey 4y ago
It's not a template but it uses Tailwind (tailwindcss.com)! Here's the full list of design inspirations for the site: https://twitter.com/steventey/status/1572958213250629633 https://twitter.com/steventey/status/1572958213250629633

Komodai 4y ago

Your site is completely killing my browser.

orangepurple 4y ago

Reminder that there are also great tools designed to do the opposite. https://aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com/ https://aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa... google.com becomes https://aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com/aàÃaAæâÄæäÁÃÅæâÀÁÁÆÂÁAâÂÂàÄàâáÄÃáÆÁàaÆÃàåáâÄÄÃâãåâæáÀÂÅAÂãaåäãääÅÅAäÆÄaåæÆãaÂæÅÀàãÅÆÂÅÁæÅAàÄÁÃÄäÂÃáàÃÀaAÃAåæÅãâÂÅÃÅÄÂæÆÅÃÀäáâÃÁäÆÃÂÅÃâÄÁÀåæäãÆääâAàaåAÃæâÅäÁÄÆÃAÆáÃÂ?åAæãæãæaæââÁáÆáÆåæåÆåÆåæåÃåäáÅåâåÆåÄ https://aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa... shadyurl.com was fun while it lasted. Tagline: Don’t just shorten your Shady URL, make it suspicious and frightening.

steventey 4y ago
Love these lol, really gave me a good laugh when I saw them in the past
password4321 4y ago
Another chance to warn about: Shorten URLs using invisible spaces https://github.com/zws-im/zws https://github.com/zws-im/zws
- steventey 4y ago
  Whoa, had no idea this was possible. Pretty cool!

shawnrmclean 4y ago

What happens on the free plan and the 1001'th person clicks the link?

steventey 4y ago
The link still works, and the link still gets tracked in redis, you just won't be able to see the stats for the link until you upgrade. It's a similar model to Plausible.io, which I think is really fair! Let me know what you think! :)

midspectrum 4y ago

earlier there was an option to add "+" at the end of any bit.ly link and you can see the stats of any shortened URL. Is that something you've given a thought?

steventey 4y ago
Oh interesting! You can actually do that right now with https://dub.sh/stats/<YOUR_SHORTLINK_SLUG> https://dub.sh/stats/<YOUR_SHORTLINK_SLUG> E.g. https://dub.sh/stats/github https://dub.sh/stats/github But I like this idea, might just add it to Dub... ;)

FlashBlaze 4y ago

Still need to fix some bugs, but I made an URL expander using Preact and Cloudflare Workers: https://expand.flashblaze.xyz/ https://expand.flashblaze.xyz/

jensenbox 4y ago

Redis as a primary database gives me chills.

bawolff 4y ago

Not to be negative, but aren't there like a billion open source url shorteners at this point?

workingpatrick 4y ago

nice try nsa

somishere 4y ago

I built a very, very basic one of these a month ago to shorten a couple of unruly domains I had. Supports static and dynamic endpoints that you define. https://thesom.au/gh/shorturl https://thesom.au/gh/shorturl Intended to self host for free/minimal cost on CloudFlare, thus comes with built in analytics, BYO domain, etc.

steventey 4y ago
Love this, thanks for sharing!! Did you get to building out the analytics dashboard? Would love to check it out! :D
- somishere 4y ago
  No dashboard, or web interface even - the idea is that you just use CF's worker analytics for usage stats. There's no storage / db sitting behind it, just a single file to deploy as a worker. Logical next step would be to hook it into KV and include a basic auth/admin API for editing routes and retrieving stats. But even that would add a bucket load of complexity to what is essentially 20-30 lines of obtuse logic currently. Definitely no plans to deploy as a service with custom domains and enterprise offerings :)

nipperkinfeet 4y ago

Is your website cryptojacking? It blew up my GPU.

steventey 4y ago
It was because of the globe animation, which is a stripped down version of Three.js + webGL. I just merged a PR that should mitigate this: https://github.com/steven-tey/dub/pull/13 https://github.com/steven-tey/dub/pull/13 Can you check again and let me know if the performance issue is still bad?

zicxor 4y ago

Very laggy - i am getting 10 FPS in your website. You should consider optimizing. Good project, congrats!

fabform 4y ago

iamthejuan 4y ago

I had an account before in Bitly, the username is "username", one day, they just deleted my account for no reason. I never used their service again.

vixalien 4y ago

the globe on the homepage needs some lube. scrolling it on mobile takes some while