Mastodon enforces a "noreferrer" on all external links.

Damage Control Blog

@Edent This explains why we never see any traffic from Mastodon, despite people retooting and giving us favorites. It certainly gives us the impression people share links without reading our articles, unless they discuss it here.

We get privacy concerns, but this gives the impression of links going out into the void. It's not true, but we'll likely never know how many people here read our work. Ah well.

julian

@[email protected] @[email protected] I'd like to provide some context. For what it's worth NodeBB does this too.

The reason why is that spammers will often post links for backlinking and SEO purposes. Enforcing the noreferrer stops the benefit from propagating.

Your post brings up an interesting side effect, however... that crucial analytics from real traffic is lost.

Perhaps we can come up with a better solution... users with good reputation would have their links posted without those attributes.

Do you think that'd help?

cc @[email protected]

spdrnl

@Edent I don't think monetization discussions are helping Mastodon. Once there is money, there is interests, once there are interests, there are problems. I pay for my Mastodon instance. Its fine.

robot 9001

@julian @damagecontrolblog @thisismissem do you mean rel=nofollow https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/qualify-outbound-links?#nofollow ?
This is separate from noreferrer, but can be combined.

Damage Control Blog

@julian @thisismissem Considering the flood of SEO spam, that reasoning makes sense.

If a solution like users with good reputations being able to have links posted without the nofollow attribute is possible we'd be onboard.

knizer

@Edent Is there anything on the mastodon GitHub proposing this as a behavior change?

gunstick

@Edent a german news station said they get more traffic from mastodon than from twitter. So how do they masure that?

Log 🪵

@Edent

Referrer has been abused by megasites to invade user privacy. So that toy had to be taken away. Sorry. Perhaps you could put "?from=ActivityPub" in the URLs you post onto the fediverse?

Terence Eden

@spdrnl could you point out where I mentioned monetisation?

Terence Eden

@knizer I don't know. Go find out and report back!

Terence Eden

@gunstick because they put tracking links on the things they share from their official account. They cannot see what random people post.

Godfrey642

@Edent @tanavit
I agree.
One of the things i find hard about Mastodon is finding and keeping a track on ppl in interested in.

Following doesn't necessarily mean you get their posts popping up in your feed. Which is a shame bc Im missing out on a lot of interesting info and links.

datum (n=1)

@log @Edent I came here to say 1) this, and

2) in your image the no-referrer count doesn't even show. If volume is below 1% - well I guess this is a bad argument: if fedi WERE a significant source then it MIGHT be showing as no-referrer in your top 10, so - 1) still though, as log says!

Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle

@Edent @eltonfc There's some discussion here:

Change Referer value to something generic such as "urn:activitypub:mastodon" or similar · Issue #21795 · mastodon/mastodon

Pitch Currently, Mastodon does not appear in webstats anywhere, as it asks browsers to omit any referer value. This is a privacy measure to ensure that individual user accounts and small servers are not identified to webstats. As such it...

GitHub (github.com)

Matt Fantinel

@richlv @Edent it would make the instance’s URL known. A lot of instances have either very few or a single user, which would expose them as the individuals who clicked the link very quickly.

Terence Eden

@fantinel @richlv then those instances should stay private if they want to.
But surely those of us who don't want to stay private should have a choice?

Terence Eden

@datum @log approximately 50% of my traffic has no referrer.

That might be from email, Mastodon, people typing the links in directly etc.

If people have chosen to preserve their privacy, that's cool with me.

pcbeard

@Edent I’m much more interested in who I follow than who follows me. Mastodon provides everything I need. And I follow fewer and fewer high volume posters these days, so it’s all working out quite well. Social media should be a hobby not a vocation.

Terence Eden

@pcbeard ok. But you do realise that not everyone is you, right?

pcbeard

@Edent I do.