I don’t know how long or well it’ll work, but so far I was able to evade the initial “no URL shortener” Reddit filtering with it.
But for reasons I ended up paying for a month of a Pro plan on a URL shortening service to only find out I didn’t need to for what I needed, so now I’ve got a limit of like 1k links on a custom domain LMAO
So if it’ll help, DM me a comm you want a “cloaked” link to to spread around on Reddit and I’ll send you a link on a custom fresh domain you can throw around
Is reddit filtering out lemmy links or something? There’s already a lot of domains to choose from
There’s definitely something going on. Whenever I add a Lemmy instance URL that isn’t obfuscated somehow, like replacing the periods with commas or (dot), then my comment gets no likes or responses, whereas a very similar comment in the same thread without a link does.
It seems to down rank it in the algorithim, if not outright shadow remove them.
Reddit won’t show you that your comment was removed by a mod and shows removed comments on user profiles (unless they had to be nuked for legal reasons). If you suspect you’re shadow banned or if your comment was quietly removed you have to check for that from a separate account in that comment thread directly.
I’m not familiar with the reddit filtering but have you tried using cloudflare page rules? You can try capturing everything after the .tld and then forward it to a lemmy server. So for instance somedomain.tld/12345 could forward to lemmy.world/post/12345. If reddit is checking links for 301 redirects to lemmy though then that wouldn’t work.
A more advanced approach would be to use a cloudflare worker to do a proxy response so the status code is returned as 200 OK instead of 301 redirect. I haven’t tried that but i think that would be much harder for them to block and you could always make more elaborate urls to make it harder to find obvious lemmy-like structure
What is stopping from using throw away domains, return 200 OK and JS redirect?
Without knowing what reddit is doing, I’m not sure. A JS redirect could be detected, but if OPs paid shortener service is working then reddit is probably working off a simple domain block list. In that case you could use throw away domains.
But JS redirect, proxy response, etc all could just become a game of cat and mouse. Just depends how motivated either side is. But given how big reddit is, i think you’d have the advantage at least in the beginning. Just gets expensive since each time your domain gets blocked you’ll be paying to register a new one.
