You don't always see the URL, sometimes it's truncated or just the t.co link, it's not very consistent. Additionally if I want to share a URL with friends it's

You don't always see the URL, sometimes it's truncated or just the t.co link, it's not very consistent. Additionally if I want to share a URL with friends it's usually polluted with all sorts of nonsense query parameters, this tool strips them and gives you a nice clean one. As for the tracking element yeah, the link shortening services will still see my IP connecting to the service, doing a head request, just with a different user agent (whatever the one go's stdlib sets). One extra layer could be to move the go service out of the network, but tbh I didn't start this project with these considerations in mind