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.)
And now, mastodon.social sends referrers!
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/33214
(Don't worry, it is up to your instance to opt in to this. Your Mastodon install is private by default.)
A couple of changes here, ultimately with the goal of making it easier to control the referrer policy by setting ALLOW_REFERRER_ORIGIN to true in the environment. The abundance of rel="norefer...
Referer traffic from Mastodon.social has started coming through to my blog!
Full write-up this lunchtime.
If you run a large Mastodon instance, and have upgraded to 4.4, please turn on referer headers.
It is *so* important for the health of the Fediverse.
At the moment I have 4x the followers on Mastodon as I do on BlueSky - but my blog's stats don't show that. In fact, they show the opposite!
Yes, it is privacy preserving. Yes, it makes a difference to publishers. Yes, it will show how vibrant an ecosystem we have.
Is this because showing how the site generates referral traffic will... IDK let people know how active it is here or?
Can someone explain more why this is important?
I think some of the small and mid-size instances enjoy the fact that we have these huge active conversations, but no one knows where the traffic is coming from.
Because if they did... what would they do? Come annoy us probably, put bots on us. I can't think of anything good.
I think the biggest benefit is that news sites, webcomics, blogs and other things that are regularly linked here will see that they have enough traffic coming from mastodon that it might be worth making a first party account instead of relying on others sharing the posts.
And government agencies! While they can’t “see”’ anyone reading announcements from anything but the corporate socials there’s going to be less support for publishing anywhere else.
If we had an actually functional government I would say that it would be nice to have an official activitypub compatible instance of something (mastodon or whatever) for every .gov agency that is used for official announcements. Then Threads, Bluesky, Twitter or whatever can implement the protocol if they want it published there too.
I think RSS is _even more universal_?
It's *technically* more universal, but I know more people who know how to follow people on the fedi than who know what an RSS feed even is or how to follow one.
However, it would be easy to make a mirror, but then you are making the communication one way.
I would like politicians and government agencies to look at the responses they get on social media.
But not do that through a corporation.
Hmmmm!!
I want announcements and chat pretty clearly separated but I like your argument too.
I wonder if “see a RSS feed as no-answer-possible posts in your timeline” is a sensible option for Fediverse *server* software
(for all I know it’s in the spec already)
There's a few projects like https://github.com/dariusk/rss-to-activitypub
Terence Eden
myrmepropagandist
George B
clew
qrazi