Mastodon enforces a "noreferrer" on all external links.
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@Godfrey642 @Edent @tanavit the ability to get notifications to specific people’s posts is a really helpful feature for me
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@Edent @fantinel
Oh yeah, one-user instances would definitely benefit from that. And maybe instances for users in regions with oppression etc.I was sure URLs shared on Masto show up with referrer, if only splintered between all the instances... But apparently site owners have no way to see any Masto impact at all (no, tracking params do not help in any way to discover the network in the first place).
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Solarbird :flag_cascadia:replied to Terence Eden last edited by
@Edent The funny part for me is that, functionally, "no referrer" means "Mastodon."
Straight up. Essentially everything else identifies itself - and more importantly, everywhere I put stuff does - so I look for no referrer and that's my Mastodon peeps because there are virtually no exceptions to that.
So... in a funny way... it doesn't even work? Because "no referrer" just means "oh it's Mastodon" which means I know where it's from anyway. xD
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Terence Edenreplied to Solarbird :flag_cascadia: last edited by
@moira errr? No?
Links from email, WhatsApp, manually copied, and a hundred other sources all contribute to that total. You've no way of knowing how many are from Mastodon and how many are from a bookmark.
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You have to 'curate' your feed yourself - there is, thank goodness, no algorithm doing it for you.
This can be awkward, it's true - I feel bad about not following back a lot of Americans, for example - but if I did I'd lose my feed's balance between English and French, America and Europe, etc...
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@GeofCox lists are helpful with that: content you would like to see, but don’t want in your main feed
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@UlrikeHahn @Edent @tanavit
How do you do that ?
(Get notifications to specific ppl ?) -
@Edent
Is this a hypothesis of yours or have you heard someone say this about their own or their organisation's participation? Because everyone I have ever seen saying "Mastodon didn't work out for me, I'm leaving for Bluesky" never really participated here to begin with. They registered, posted a few times and then went quiet. I doubt they thought about referrer statistics at all. -
@violanders I spoke to lots of organisations - big and small - about getting them on to the Fediverse.
They all said exactly the same thing "We have a limited budget and can only go where we know there is engagement."
Their server logs showed lots of traffic from BSky and none from here. So guess where they went?
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Both are available in the interface of the mastodon application.
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@tanavit you're so close!
How do people discover Mastodon if they've never heard of it?
Re-read the original post.
Bye!
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@Edent Now fixed on nightly, I assume in response to your post: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/33214
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And now, mastodon.social sends referrers!
Change referrer policy to be controlled by header in web UI by Gargron · Pull Request #33214 · mastodon/mastodon
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="noreferrer" ...
GitHub (github.com)
(Don't worry, it is up to your instance to opt in to this. Your Mastodon install is private by default.)
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@Edent TIL referer headers are even something you can control. Never even crossed my mind.
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@floppy the web is a weird and wonderful place!
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@Edent Interesting! I imagine Mastodon’s impact in referral stats is also diluted by being spread across many instance URLs, many of which don’t include the word “mastodon” anywhere.
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Referer traffic from Mastodon.social has started coming through to my blog!
Full write-up this lunchtime.
