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Why are URL-shorteners needed at all?

You can do it without ...
In principle it works without. Before the short URL services celebrated their breakthrough, you could get to the desired destination with just one click. One of the main reasons for the rapid spread is probably the character limit for tweets on the microblogging service Twitter. Until 2014, users were allowed to use a maximum of 140 characters in a tweet. In the meantime this limit has been relaxed to 280 characters, but a URL can be quite long.