Your links belong in your repo, not our database

There is a question every link-in-bio service quietly asks you to stop thinking about: what happens to your page if we do something you dislike?

The honest answer, almost everywhere, is you rebuild it somewhere else and hope the old link stops being shared. Your links were rows in a database you cannot reach, at a URL under a domain you do not own. Even the good services — the well-run ones with an export button — are asking for the same trust. An export is a copy. It is not the thing.

What we did instead

Linker writes every link you add into your own atproto repository, as a cool.linker.link record. It is the same repository your Bluesky posts live in. When someone loads your page, our renderer reads those records and draws them.

That is the entire relationship. We hold no copy of your links, which means there is no copy for us to lose, sell, or hold over you.

It also means the guarantee is not a policy. Policies change with ownership and funding rounds. This is a fact about where bytes are: they are in a repository addressed by your DID, on a server you chose, readable by anything that speaks atproto. We could not take them away if we wanted to.

The part people miss

The interesting consequence is not the leaving. It is that you never had to integrate in the first place.

Because your links are public records in an open protocol, any other tool can already read them. Somebody could write a different renderer this afternoon and your page would work there too, with no migration, no export, and nothing for us to approve. We are one client of your data among the possible ones. We happen to be the one that also gives you a dashboard and a fast page.

That is a strange thing for a company to build on purpose, and we understand why it is rare. It is much better business to be the only door. But if you are going to ask somebody to put the most load-bearing link they own into your product, we think you owe them the ability to walk out of it without asking.

What we still hold

We are not claiming to hold nothing. We hold your account, your subscription status, and — if you have claimed one — the short name that points at your DID. Those are ours to run because they are about routing, not about content.

And if you would rather not depend on anyone else’s server for the identity either, the Creator plan will open you an atproto account on our own. It is a real one. You can migrate it away, which we would rather you knew up front than discovered when you needed it.