Mastodon enforces a "noreferrer" on all external links.
I have mixed feelings about that.
As a blogger, I want to see *where* visitors are coming from. I also like to see (and sometimes join in) with the conversations they're having.
But, I get that people want privacy and don't want to "leak" where they're visiting from.
Is it such a bad thing to tell a website "I was referred from this specific server"?
Two years later.
Want to know one of the major reasons Mastodon didn't catch on with journalists and large website owners?
It is *invisible* in referrer statistics.
Here's my blog from the last month.
BlueSky now sends me more traffic than Bing.
How much traffic does Mastodon send? It is impossible to know due to the "noreferrer" header in all links.
(I'm not saying your privacy isn't important. But you can't grow a community if no-one knows you exist.)
@Edent Interesting, hadn’t considered that.
I wonder if there are Mastodon clients that auto-add UTM codes. That’d be *something* at least.
People only care about me, when I give them some points to count?
What about: Nope!
(a.k.a. Fuck off!)
@AdeptVeritatis more like "people only know about me if I tell them I exist".
Do you get that difference?
I fully support your right to be private. But you do understand that some of us like talking to interesting people outside our normal social spheres, right?
@katafrakt
Again, you're offering no evidence and clearly haven't worked in this sphere.
Most analytics packages can aggregate referrers. So you see "Yahoo" as an whole entity rather than being split into .in, .pl, .uk etc.
I have direct first hand experience of working on this problem. You, apparently, do not.
Obviously, you're welcome to believe what you like. But please don't confuse it for knowledge.
You literally said it, they want to get insight into my life.
So why should I give these stalkers my data?
@whimsy but the issue isn't just limited to journalists.
Why would a musician or author focus their time here if they can't see a positive impact on their reach?
Why would your friends come here if they can't also follow journalists that they like?
It is fine if you don't see the need for specific users, but that denies choice to everyone else.
@WiteWulf @ianb
But how will you know that it is there to engage with?
That's the fundamental question.
I'd never heard of reddit before it popped up in my referrer logs. So I went, created an account, and talked with the people discussing my stuff.
There's no way to do that here.
(And, yes, it is fine if people want to share in private if that's their choice.)
@Edent @ianb the same way everyone else does: you search for and follow hashtags that are relevant to your interests. You find the interesting people who talk about the subjects you’re interested in, follow them, strike up conversations with the people who correspond with them, and follow them if you want to.
You seem to be more interested in finding people who are interested in *you*, than like-minded people who share a topic of conversation
@Edent @WiteWulf @ianb You asked how people learn of the communit's existence. People aren't clustered to a single community. I learned about Mastodon from Twitter users about 4 years ago, and I found it interesting. That's how communities grow. Your reddit story is an outlier.
If you're asking "How can businesses learn of the marketing potential of the platform", then the answer is, as previously stated, indeed "fuck off". People aren't here to be funneled to your blog/newssite/youtube/etc
Yes, that's not helpful for analysing your impact. But you can get statistics with an URL-parameter. That's how I make my graphs:
https://social.heise.de/@mho/113596206067700321
On the other hand, as far as I remember, there was (is?) a problem with #Bluesky not sending a referrer all the time either:
https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/2540
Angehängt: 1 Bild A little late, but here are the last numbers for traffic from #X / #Twitter (where we're stopped posting) and its competitors to heise.de. #Mastodon & #Bluesky now clearly in front, #Threads still a bit behind X. #SocialMedia #Fediverse #eXit #Xodus #TwitterMigration
@Edent Huh Hadn’t really thought about it, but yeah, seems like something that could be server/user controllable.
Agree plenty may like being essentially unseen, but I wouldn’t mind letting others know I came from here to their story so they build their presence here.
@Edent It's a bit of an HTML limitation, that there's no way to map referrer URLs to a sanitized or canonical URL, without obfuscating the actual destination to pass it through a link service (like t.co). I guess too much potential for abuse?
Examples: for public posts, I'd want the referrer to be the canonical URL of the post, not the URL of the post as processed on my server.
For private/followers-only posts, I'd want the referrer (if any) to be some anonymized version of the network domain.
@Edent
Your logic doesn’t follow. It is not sufficient if everyone knows you exist that you can grow a community. It’s helpful, agreed. If your goal is to grow a community based on what you write, it’s necessary to write that which elicits a sympathetic response.
The number of viewers alone provides no insight regarding your words’ impact.
@Hippasus500 @Edent I think the point is that this policy makes it completely impossible for orgs to see the utility of Mastodon* and so it will be scrubbed from the things they're willing to spend time on.
*Unless they have enough control to add tracking IDs to the URL (which they don't for organic mentions).
@InsertUser @Edent
The implicit assumption in both these arguments is that the raw number of viewers is the sole determinant whether Mastodon has utility for journalism.
I’m not rejecting the metric out of hand. I’m merely saying it is not sufficient for the conclusion.
It’s easy to fall into the trap, “Because I can measure x, x must explain y.”
Maybe it does. Perhaps not.
Robert Pirsig’s concept of Quality comes to mind.
@InsertUser
Implicit: implied but not plainly expressed. That is precisely the word I mean.
This isn’t simply wordplay. I’m asking you to carefully ask yourself what you’re intending to say. All we have here are words. Precision and logic are crucial.
A brilliant piece by @Daojoan speaks to why I’m being so fussy:
How to Destroy a Generation? Make Them Think the World Runs on Their Feelings—and Then Use Those Feelings Against Them If you wanted to dismantle an entire generation from the inside out, it wouldn’t take much. Forget bombs or economic sabotage—too messy, too obvious. No, if you
@Hippasus500
Does your dictionary also include the word condescending?
Saying that sites can't see Mastodon's ability to generate traffic and so will be disinclined to support it doesn't imply that that's its "sole" use. It's just saying that its use is harder for them to see.
@InsertUser
The original proposition assumes the conclusion. The argument proceeds with faulty logic to justify the conclusion. Your original statement made the same mistake.
Your last statement is more nuanced and justified with the argument that numbers matter, something with which I agreed, btw.
Claiming that only numbers matter is flawed logic.
“I lost my keys in the parking lot over there.”
“Why are looking under the streetlight?”
“No lights in the parking lot.”
Old joke.
@Edent whole point of decline of referrer header is to improve privacy.
You have no right to know the origin of every link to your content.
If the origin wants to interact with your content, you can provide a comment section on your website, webmentions etc. and maybe they will tell you.
If you want to track links to their origin, use unique tracking links; link shorteners, UTM parameters etc.
You will notice that folks unshorten and remove those or outright will refuse to interact with them.
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