Show HN: I made an open-source Bitly alternative

slang800

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) releases.

That way, when you shut down your service, we can figure out what some of these short links went to.

bluetidepro

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.

robin_reala

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?

TimLeland

I'm the creator of 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/

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

orangepurple

Reminder that there are also great tools designed to do the opposite.

https://aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...

google.com becomes https://aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...

shadyurl.com was fun while it lasted. Tagline: Don’t just shorten your Shady URL, make it suspicious and frightening.

overshard

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.

KronisLV

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/

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...

Of course, one can also find some free services hosted by others.

trevcanhuman

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#Pasteb...

jonas-w

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?

jackson1442

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.

medv

Here’s mine: https://xn--gda.at

dijit

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://github.com/dijit/redirector-rs

kls0e

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

[0] https://yourls.org/

gnicholas

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.

memorable

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

memorable

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.

agucova

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

statico

I did something similar with 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/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).

pluc

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-goog...

aliljet

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

anderspitman

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

somishere

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

Intended to self host for free/minimal cost on CloudFlare, thus comes with built in analytics, BYO domain, etc.

memorable

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

jiffygist

Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).

I'm using Bromite on Android

HeckFeck

The grandfather of all link shorteners: 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.

jeffreygoesto

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

FlashBlaze

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

foxbee

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

iamthejuan

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.

midspectrum

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?

Rafsark

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"

miked85

The last thing the Internet needs is more link shorteners.

xmonkee

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

mnemnc

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?

zicxor

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

bawolff

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

shawnrmclean

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

nipperkinfeet

Is your website cryptojacking? It blew up my GPU.

jensenbox

Redis as a primary database gives me chills.

jedberg

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?

vixalien

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

workingpatrick

nice try nsa

waynesonfire

in rust?

Komodai

Your site is completely killing my browser.

jawadch93

fabform

indonxmalon