Mastodon enforces a "noreferrer" on all external links.
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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.
