Mastodon enforces a "noreferrer" on all external links.
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@WestLawns you haven't read the thread properly.
External websites don't receive an HTTP Referer header when people click on links to them from Mastodon.
That means those sites don't know Masto is a source of traffic.
So they won't bother investigating it / investing time in it.
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@Edent thank you for explaining.
I did not understand what you point was. -
Terence Edenreplied to Terence Eden last edited by [email protected]
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.)
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You can build a community by "mouth to ear" which is as simple as retooting (and not favoriting).
I guess the community is better.
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@Edent Interesting, hadn’t considered that.
I wonder if there are Mastodon clients that auto-add UTM codes. That’d be *something* at least.
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@tanavit how do people find the community in the first place, if no one tells them about it?
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People only care about me, when I give them some points to count?
What about: Nope!
(a.k.a. Fuck off!) -
Christian von Schack 🇳🇴replied to Terence Eden last edited by
@Edent This is interesting. I started an account for the journal I work for; I didn’t expect much traffic, but none at all surprised me. I never thought to check the HTML, though.
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@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?
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@Edent this presumes that there being no journalists on mastodon is something that people on mastodon see as a problem. As opposed to a significant benefit.
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I do by randomly looking in the "Direct Flow".
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@Edent It isn’t just the referrals - we have developed clever ways of figuring out why stories performed well (or didn’t) - it’s the fact that reach is intrinsically limited on Mastodon. Mastodon is not big social media - and that’s both by design and OK. The interconnected small communities are something to celebrate instead of making case after case about why the numbers and features are different.
Many journalists still use it, just not for reach. -
@alexwilson I agree.
Lots of people like living in a small village. But most of their kids "brain drain" to the cities. -
@tanavit but how do people get on to the "Direct Flow" if they've never heard of it?
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@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.
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@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.)
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@Edent they might come here, for example, because they know the things they say won't be taken out of context and turned into a sensationalist article.
I'm old enough to remember hanging out on newsgroups, and IRC, and forums, and livejournal, and I don't remember anyone there worrying that they wouldn't be able to build a community if it wasn't possible for everyone in the world to use the space as their own personal marketing campaign. -
@whimsy hey, quick Q, what happened to newsgroups and IRC?
Are they still thriving? -
Amelia Bellamy-Roydsreplied to Terence Eden last edited by
@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.
