Hello new people, welcome!
You don't need to use link shorteners on Mastodon!
All links in Mastodon posts count as 23 characters towards your limit, no matter how long they actually are.
Also, the links are preserved in their original form. Unlike commercial social networks, there are no trackers of any kind inserted.
More info about this and many questions answered at:
Thats great news.
In a related subject, markup shouldnt hide urls, Mastodon should reveal the url/domain, should display them beside the link.
The URL is visible on a computer if you hover the mouse over it without clicking. Equivalents on mobile are trickier, but it's a general problem with browsers as most links are behind links rather than just written URLs.